Boost your

startup application
while lowering costs
8 ways to reduce cloud costs and innovate
more for virtually every application
Table of contents
Introduction: Priority number one: Optimize costs and accelerate innovation............. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Method #1: Migrate your applications to AWS...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Method #2: Choose the instance type that matches your application needs and budget. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Method #3: Optimize costs for Windows applications.. ........................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Method #4: Migrate to AWS Graviton for the best price performance for a broad set of applications. . . . . . . . . . . 13

Method #5: Lower costs with AWS machine learning accelerators and services. . ........... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Method #6: Select the compute purchase model that best fits your budget. . ............... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Method #7: Optimize costs with a choice of storage services.. .................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Method #8: Optimize your compute resources with intelligent AWS tools.................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Customer stories.......................................................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Conclusion: Start maximizing your savings now. . .................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

2
I N T R O D U C T IO N

Priority number one: Optimize

costs and accelerate innovation
When starting a new venture, the investment that is needed to get off the ground can quickly
become overwhelming. Founders are facing enormous pressure to do more with less. They
are tasked with finding solutions that reduce costs, increase agility, accelerate innovation,
and, ultimately, deliver transformational business value. In addition, security remains a top
priority for startups at every stage, with increasing demands around data protection and
privacy and a lack of cloud security professionals globally. Founders are discovering that a
secure cloud infrastructure can support and even accelerate the speed and innovation needs
of their businesses.

The cloud offers nearly unlimited opportunities to meet these goals—and beyond. From
streamlining operations to delivering better user experiences securely, cloud migration
enables startups to yield substantial cost savings while presenting new business opportunities.
In a recent Gartner survey, infrastructure and operations leaders ranked cost savings among
their top priorities.1 Not surprisingly, business leaders and startup founders, in particular, are
looking for ways to speed up their digital transformation so that they can improve operational
efficiencies and invest in innovation. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers support and services
to enable startups to solve the big challenges, turn ideas into reality, and prove what’s possible.

Wherever you are in your cloud journey, whether it’s migrating your applications to
AWS or building cloud-native applications to innovate faster and create new customer
experiences, enabling startups to achieve more while lowering costs is central to how
AWS builds cloud technology.

“Gartner Leadership Vision for 2022: Top 3 Strategic Priorities for CIOs,” Gartner, 2021
3
1
Get started with saving costs
Where does cost optimization start? Thinking about cloud migration as it
applies to your startup’s unique challenges, goals, and opportunities is a
place to begin.

AWS enables you to take control of costs and continuously optimize your
startup spend while building modern, scalable applications to meet your
needs. The breadth of services and pricing options offers the flexibility
to effectively manage your costs while maintaining the performance and
capacity you require. AWS is dedicated to helping startups achieve the
highest savings potential.

AWS can help you wherever you are in your cloud journey—with
eight ways to optimize costs—so you can focus on innovating to gain
competitive advantage.

4
The AWS Well-Architected Framework: A guide for
best practices
We have created the AWS Well-Architected Framework to help you understand the pros and
cons of the decisions you make while building systems on AWS. Using the AWS WA Framework
helps you learn architectural best practices for designing and operating secure, reliable,
efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the AWS Cloud.

The Cost Optimization pillar of the AWS WA Framework includes the ability to run systems
to deliver business value at the lowest price point. There are five design principles for cost
Access a potential
optimization in the cloud: cost savings of 75%
(40 hours versus 168
• Implement Cloud Financial Management: To achieve financial success and hours) when you stop
accelerate business value realization in the cloud, you need to invest in Cloud Financial
Management/cost optimization. Your startup needs to dedicate time and resources to build
development and test
capability in this new domain of technology and usage management. Like your security or environments when
operational excellence capability, you need to build capability through knowledge building, they are not in use.
programs, resources, and processes to become cost-efficient. Typically, they are only
• Adopt a consumption model: Pay only for the computing resources that you used 8 hours a day
require and increase or decrease usage depending on business requirements, not by using during the week.
elaborate forecasting.
• Measure overall efficiency: Measure the business output of the workload and the
costs associated with delivering it. Use this measure to know the gains you make from
increasing output and reducing costs.
• Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting: AWS does the
heavy lifting of data center operations, such as racking, stacking, and powering servers. AWS
also removes the operational burden of managing operating systems and applications with
managed services. This allows you to focus on your customers and business projects rather
than on IT infrastructure.
• Analyze and attribute expenditure: The cloud makes it easier to accurately
identify the usage and cost of systems, which then allows transparent attribution of IT costs
to individual workload owners. This helps measure return on investment (ROI) and gives
workload owners an opportunity to optimize their resources and reduce costs.

5
The AWS WA Framework is designed to help your team build secure, high- Cost-efficiency and cost-effectiveness enable startups like yours to experiment
performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications at lower costs and accelerate innovation. Maximizing savings so startups can
and workloads. To help you apply best practices, we have created AWS Well- focus on innovation is at the core of what we do.
Architected Labs, which provide a repository of code and documentation
to give you hands-on experience implementing best practices. We also have
teamed up with select AWS Partner Network Partners that are members of
the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program. These AWS Partners have deep AWS relentlessly optimizes the
AWS knowledge and can help you review and improve your workloads. efficiency of AWS services—since its
inception, it has reduced prices
AWS: A cloud pioneer from the beginning
With more than a million active customers and a global cloud presence, AWS
has experience in helping startups at every stage migrate workloads to the
AWS Cloud.

AWS pioneered cloud computing in 2006, years before any other cloud
115x
provider. Since the beginning, we have helped customers across industries
migrate their workloads to the cloud, offering more performance at lower This eBook guides you through eight ways you can reduce costs and make
costs than any other cloud provider. room for more innovation by optimizing your infrastructure investment.

6
METHOD #1

Migrate your applications

to AWS
Familiarity and low friction are common reasons behind a startup’s choice of Migrate any workload—applications, websites, databases, storage, physical
a first development platform. Attractive entry pricing, functional advantage, or virtual servers, and even entire data centers—from an on-premises
and a founder’s preference or brand bias are others. As products and environment, hosting facility, or other public cloud to AWS. At every step,
teams grow, so does the cloud landscape. Infrequently but occasionally, we leverage our years of experience to build your organizational, operational, and
see startups that run IT operations in a multi-cloud environment. This is technical capabilities to start gaining business benefits from the beginning of
often the result of team turnover or acquisition activity. It can also be the the migration process.
choice of startup engineering teams that prefer to develop and run core
applications on premises or in collocated environments—for security or other Save on third-party licensing costs
IP-related reasons.
AWS provides an option to save on third-party licensing costs and run your
AWS recommends choosing a primary cloud provider to get the best resources more efficiently: the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment
experience, performance, and cost at your cloud-native startup. The multi- (AWS OLA).
cloud approach, while understandable in concept, typically generates
The AWS OLA is a free program for new and existing customers. It gives you
undesirable growth in overhead—person-hours, expense, and technical debt—
a clear overview of your current costs and potential savings by assessing your
as a startup grows in size and operating history.
current on-premises IT environment, third-party licenses, and projections of
Startups often must use solutions from multiple providers to provision, running these workloads on AWS.
manage, and govern IT resources to monitor the health of their applications
The AWS OLA will provide you with a report that will model your deployment
and collect and analyze data stored in multiple locations. To help customers
options using existing licensing entitlements. These results can help you
overcome these challenges, AWS has extended its services over the past
explore available cost savings across our flexible licensing options. The AWS
several years to help create, manage, and govern infrastructure and
OLA can also be used in combination with the AWS Migration Acceleration
applications hosted in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Program (AWS MAP) for Windows, providing you with tools, support, and
resources during your cloud migration.

7
Innovate faster, reduce costs, and enhance security

Take advantage of better performance at lower costs with AWS. AWS Enhanced security: The Nitro Security Chip provides a simple hardware-
collaborates with major processor manufacturers to offer you the latest- based root of trust, enabling the most secure cloud platform with a minimized
generation processors, and for nearly a decade, AWS has invested in designing attack surface. Virtualization and security functions are offloaded to dedicated
and producing silicon optimized for the cloud. Our custom silicon enables hardware and software. Additionally, a locked-down security model prohibits
us to offer you industry-leading performance, enhanced security, and faster all administrative access, including those of Amazon employees, eliminating
innovation—all at lower costs. the possibility of human error and tampering.

Designed virtualization platform: The AWS Speed of innovation: With the AWS Nitro System, functions are
Nitro System modularized. It breaks the Amazon EC2 architecture into smaller blocks by
The AWS Nitro System is the underlying platform for our modern Amazon offloading the virtualization functions onto dedicated hardware. These blocks
Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. It delivers the best price can be assembled in many ways, which delivers the flexibility to design and
performance of any cloud provider, along with enhanced security and speed of rapidly deliver EC2 instances with an ever-broadening number of compute,
innovation: storage, memory, and networking options. The results are lower costs and the
ability to bring more workloads to the cloud, enabling you to increase your
Best price performance: With the AWS Nitro System, Amazon EC2 pace of innovation.
instances can deliver more than 15 percent higher throughput performance
on some workloads as compared to other major cloud providers running the
same CPU. Dedicated Nitro Cards enable high-speed networking, high-speed
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and I/O acceleration. Not having
AWS firsts—innovation for your digital business
to hold back resources for management software means more savings passed First to offer AMD, Arm, and macOS instances in the cloud
on to end users. Additionally, the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) Express First with custom-built silicon for general purpose, HPC, and ML
for Amazon EC2 instances, introduced in 2022, delivers up to 25 Gbps of workloads in the cloud
single-flow bandwidth—up from 5 Gbps—at no additional cost to customers. First with the Nitro System
This latest Nitro-based innovation improves price performance by providing First to offer Intel’s latest, third-generation, Intel Xeon Scalable
processors
customers with more bandwidth without incurring additional costs.
First to offer DDR5 memory in the cloud

8
METHOD #2

Choose the instance type that

matches your application needs
and budget
AWS instance types
AWS has more than 600 instance types, exceeding any other cloud provider. Each instance type
provides a choice of processor, storage, networking, and operating system, so you can choose
the instance configuration that best fits your startup-specific workload. And each instance type
includes one or more instance sizes, allowing you to scale your resources to the requirements of
your target workload.

AWS gives you the flexibility to change your instance type as quickly as your needs change,
eliminating overhead costs for unused resources.

AWS has more than

600
instance types

9
Amazon EC2 instances fall into 6 categories:

1 4
General purpose Accelerated computing
Our most popular instances provide a balance of CPU, memory, Instances in this category include additional accelerators and
and network resources and are ideal for running web servers, GPUs, FPGAs, and machine learning (ML) chips that provide
containerized microservices, caching fleets, and development massive amounts of parallel processing for tasks such as graphics
environments. One of the main distinctions within this class processing, ML training, ML inference, and high performance
is between instances with fixed performance (Amazon EC2 computing (HPC).
M7g, for example) versus burstable (Amazon EC2 T4g, for

2 5
example) performance. Storage optimized
Ideal for tasks requiring local access to very large amounts of
Compute optimized
storage, extreme storage performance, or both. Instances are
Good for compute-intensive, CPU-bound, demanding applications, available that include both large-capacity HDD and extreme low-
such as frontend fleets for high-traffic websites, on-demand latency local NVMe SSDs. Choose from the industry’s broadest
batch processing, distributed analytics, video encoding, dedicated portfolio of storage solutions optimized for your block, file, and
gaming servers, and high-performance science and engineering object data.
applications. These instances offer the highest ratio of virtual CPUs

6
to memory than the other families and the lowest cost-per-virtual HPC optimized
CPU of all the EC2 instance types.

3
HPC instances are purpose-built to offer the best price
performance for running HPC workloads at scale on AWS. HPC
Memory optimized
instances are ideal for applications that benefit from high-
These instances are ideal for memory-intensive applications, such performance processors, such as large, complex simulations and
as real-time big data analytics, in-memory databases, enterprise- deep learning workloads.
class applications that require significant memory resources, or
general analytics, such as Hadoop or Spark.

10
M E T H O D #3

Optimize costs for

Windows applications
Are you looking to boost the reliability and availability of your Windows Server workloads?
Or maybe you’ve reached the end-of-service (EOS) cutoff, where your SQL Server workloads will
lose their patches and security updates.

You’re not alone. Customers across multiple industries have been running Windows workloads
on AWS since 2009, long before it was possible with other cloud providers. AWS supports
everything you expect to build and run on Windows, including Active Directory, .NET, SQL
Server, Windows desktop as a service (DaaS), and supported versions of Windows Server.

With AWS as the foundation for your Windows environment, there’s no

limit to the range of business benefits you can achieve, including:

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): You can reduce your five-year cost of
operations by 56 percent and gain 37 percent lower infrastructure costs, delivering up to
442 percent ROI over three years.

Licensing options: AWS has helped many customers break free from restrictive licensing
scenarios. By purchasing license-included instances of Amazon EC2 or Amazon Relational
Database Service (Amazon RDS), you get new, fully compliant SQL Server licenses from AWS.

License optimization: An AWS OLA can help reduce the number of Windows Server cores
requiring a license by 77 percent and the number of SQL Server cores requiring a license by
45 percent when modeling workloads from on premises to AWS.

Better performance: Achieve two times better performance when you run your
SQL Server workloads on an Amazon EC2 R5b.8xlarge instance.

Higher reliability: By moving your Windows workloads to AWS, you can realize a
98 percent reduction in unplanned downtime.

11
Can you bring your Microsoft licenses to AWS?

The answer is a resounding YES! There are three Windows Server, SQL Server, Office, and Visual Studio licenses will always be
fully compliant. You have the option to purchase Amazon Machine Images
ways to do this:
(AMIs) from AWS or through the AWS Marketplace. Choose AWS-provided
licenses if you want to:

Option 1: Bring your own license (BYOL) to AWS • Pay as you go—with no upfront costs or long-term commitments
• Fully control when you are being billed for license-included instances
You can often deploy eligible Microsoft applications on AWS by bringing your
own licenses. AWS is a Microsoft Authorized License Mobility Partner, so if you • Get out of the business of managing licensing compliance and leave it up to
have licenses with License Mobility—such as SQL Server with active Software AWS—we will handle it!
Assurance—you can bring them to Amazon EC2 with default (shared) tenancy.
Choose BYOL if you want to:
Option 3: Replace your Microsoft-licensed products
• Take advantage of cloud efficiencies and leverage your existing and applications
licensing investments
You can speed up innovation with specialized built-for-the-cloud alternatives
• Extend the lifecycle of your software without additional hardware costs
by replacing your Microsoft-licensed products and applications. Your
• Expedite your migration to the cloud by using existing virtual modernization journey could include moving to Linux, porting applications
machine images from .NET Framework to .NET, decomposing monoliths into microservices,
implementing DevOps techniques with container and serverless technologies,
Option 2: Get your Microsoft licenses from AWS and transitioning your data tier to Amazon Aurora and other purpose-built
databases. Choose this option if you want to:
You can use AWS instances that include the cost of licensing. By using
AWS-provided licenses on Amazon EC2 or Amazon RDS instances, your • Move off legacy licensing for ultimate freedom and savings
• Break free from the punitive terms and high costs of Microsoft licenses

12
METHOD #4

Migrate to AWS Graviton

for the best price
performance for a broad
set of applications
AWS designed AWS Graviton processors to deliver the best performance at the lowest cost for
your cloud workloads running on Amazon EC2. AWS Graviton–based instances deliver up to 40
percent better performance at lower costs versus comparable x86-based EC2 instances. They
are also highly energy efficient, using up to 60 percent less energy for the same performance as
comparable Amazon EC2 instances.

AWS Graviton is available in over 25 AWS Regions, and migrating to AWS Graviton can help you
increase performance, reduce costs, lower latency, and achieve better scalability.

The AWS Graviton Fast Start program helps you quickly and easily move your workloads to
AWS Graviton in less than four hours. Or, accelerate your adoption of AWS Graviton with the
help of AWS Graviton Partners.

AWS Graviton–powered managed services

AWS Graviton–based instances are also available in more than 25 popular managed AWS
services. These services deliver the price performance benefits of AWS Graviton processors
while providing a fully managed experience. AWS Managed Services using AWS Graviton
include serverless solutions, such as AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, and AWS Graviton–based
databases, such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, and Amazon ElastiCache.

13
METHOD #5

Lower costs with AWS

machine learning
accelerators and services
AWS designed AWS Inferentia accelerators to deliver high performance at the lowest cost in
Amazon EC2 for ML inference applications. The first-generation AWS Inferentia accelerator
powers Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances, which deliver up to 2.3 times higher throughput and up to
70 percent lower cost per inference than comparable GPU-based instances. AWS Inferentia2
accelerator is purpose-built to deploy ML models, such as large language models (LLMs) and
diffusion models, with more than 100 billion parameters. Inferentia2-based Amazon EC2
Inf2 instances deliver up to four times higher throughput and up to 10 times lower latency
compared to Inf1 instances. They also deliver up to 70 percent better price performance than
comparable GPU-based instances in Amazon EC2.

AWS Trainium is an ML accelerator that AWS purpose-built for high-performance, low-cost

deep learning training. Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances powered by Trainium chips offer up to 50
percent cost-to-train savings over comparable GPU-based EC2 instances. Trn1 instances are the
first EC2 instances with up to 800 Gbps of Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) network bandwidth. They
are deployed in EC2 UltraClusters that enable scaling up to 30,000 Trainium accelerators, which
are interconnected with a non-blocking petabit-scale network to provide up to 6.3 exaflops of
compute.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that offers high-performance, low-cost ML

at scale. SageMaker enables startups of all sizes to build, train, and deploy ML models with a
choice of tools and workflows—integrated development environments (IDEs) for data scientists
and engineers, no-code interfaces for business analysts, and support for the leading ML
frameworks, toolkits, and programming languages for MLOps engineers.

14
To make it easier for your startup to get started, Amazon SageMaker JumpStart is an ML
hub that provides built-in algorithms with pretrained models from model hubs, pretrained
foundation models to help you perform tasks such as article summarization and image
generation, and pre-built solutions to solve common use cases. In addition, you can share ML
artifacts, including ML models and notebooks, within your organization to accelerate ML model
building and deployment.

Visit the AWS Machine Learning Infrastructure webpage to learn more about how you can
choose your ML infrastructure, tools, and frameworks to accelerate ML innovation.

Tens of thousands of customers are

using SageMaker to generate more than

1 Trillion
predictions per month

15
METHOD #6

Select the compute purchase

model that best fits your budget
On-Demand Instances
On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour or second, depending on
which instances you run. No long-term commitments or upfront payments are needed. On- Reduce your bill by up
Demand Instances are ideal for applications with short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads
to 72% compared to
that cannot be interrupted and applications being developed or tested on Amazon EC2 for the
first time.
On-Demand prices in
exchange for a 1- or
Savings Plans 3-year hourly spend
Take advantage of Savings Plans with flexible pricing models to achieve cost-efficiency. AWS
commitment. Choose
offers three types of plans: Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, and SageMaker savings plans with
Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans apply to usage across Amazon EC2, Lambda, and flexible pricing models.
Fargate. The EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply to EC2 usage, and the SageMaker Savings Plans
apply to SageMaker usage. Savings Plans automatically and simultaneously apply to eligible
AWS usage. They enable you to innovate faster by leveraging the newest instances, families,
generations, and regions while staying on the same plan. Since the launch of Savings Plans in
2019, customers have saved more than $15 billion.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS Cloud. Spot
Instances are available at up to a 90 percent discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can
use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications, such as big data,
containerized workloads, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), web servers,
HPC, and test and development workloads.

You can easily combine Spot Instances with other purchase models, giving you the flexibility
to grow and change over time while still getting the lowest cost available on AWS. Since 2015,
Spot Instances have helped our customers save more than $8 billion.

16
The Amazon CloudFront security savings bundle is a flexible, self-service pricing plan that
helps you save up to 30 percent on your CloudFront bill in exchange for a monthly spend
commitment of a one-year term. These savings are not limited to data delivered by CloudFront
but apply to all CloudFront usage types, including CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge.
The CloudFront security savings bundle also includes free AWS WAF usage up to 10 percent of
your committed amount.

TextNow saves 93% on data transfer fees using AWS

PrivateLink
TextNow used AWS PrivateLink to connect its Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
with Datadog, a popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, while keeping all data on the
AWS network. By eliminating the need to send data over the public internet, AWS PrivateLink
reduced TextNow’s data transfer fees by 93 percent and improved user data security.

Read the case study ›

15B+
Since 2019, customers
have saved $15 billion with
Savings Plans

8B+
Since 2015, customers
have saved $8 billion with
EC2 Spot Instances

17
METHOD #7

Optimize costs with a choice

of storage services
You can minimize your TCO with AWS Storage services. These services eliminate on-premises
capital equipment investment, management complexity, and infrastructure maintenance. With
AWS Storage, you get the right mix of price and performance for your workloads while paying
only for the storage that you use.

AWS gives you the broadest array of storage services of any cloud provider. This includes more
ways to optimize storage costs through a choice of storage classes and intelligently tier data to
lower cost storage and data reduction capabilities, such as compression and data deduplication.

For block-based workloads, Amazon EBS provides easy-to-use, high-performance block storage
at any scale. You select the storage that best fits your workload, service level, and budget.
Amazon EBS scales fast for your most demanding, high-performance workloads, including
Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP products. Amazon EBS Snapshots provide a solution to maintain
compliance and further reduce snapshot storage costs by up to 75 percent by using Amazon
Data Lifecycle Manager to automatically move seldom-used snapshots to the Amazon EBS
Snapshots Archive.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is the lowest-cost object storage in the cloud. No
matter the size of your startup, Amazon S3 lets you store and protect any amount of data for
virtually any use case, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps. Amazon
S3 storage classes provide the lowest-cost storage for specific access patterns. And Amazon
S3 Intelligent-Tiering has saved customers more than $750 million in storage costs compared
to Amazon S3 Standard since the launch of S3 Intelligent-Tiering in 2018. With cost-effective
storage classes and easy-to-use management features, you can optimize costs, organize
data, and configure fine-tuned access controls to meet specific business, organizational, and
compliance requirements. AWS offers the industry’s widest portfolio of fully managed file
storage. We handle all infrastructure—provisioning, patching, and backups—allowing you to
choose the right file system technology to meet your workload requirements.

18
 $750M
AWS offers the industry’s widest portfolio of fully managed file storage. We handle all
infrastructure—provisioning, patching, and backups—allowing you to choose the right file
system technology to meet your workload requirements.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a serverless elastic file system that scales
automatically as files are added, removed, and burst to higher throughput levels when Since its launch in 2018,
necessary. You can also reduce costs by up to 92 percent by automatically tiering infrequently S3 Intelligent-Tiering has
accessed files. The Amazon FSx file system family includes Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP,
saved customers more
Amazon FSx for OpenZFS, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, and Amazon FSx for Lustre.
Amazon FSx enables you to optimize your price and performance to support a broad spectrum than $750 million in
of use cases, from small user shares to the most demanding compute-intensive workloads. storage costs compared
Amazon FSx file systems support a rich set of storage efficiency features, including data
to S3 Standard
deduplication, compression, and usage quotas.

50%+
Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes are purpose-built for data archiving, providing you with the
highest performance, most retrieval flexibility, and lowest-cost archive storage in the cloud.

Amazon FSx family data

75%
EBS Snapshots Archive reduces
reduction technology reduces
snapshots storage costs by up
storage costs by up to 65%
to 75%

92% Amazon EFS reduces storage

costs by 92%

19
METHOD #8

Optimize your compute resources

with intelligent AWS tools
AWS Compute Optimizer and AWS Auto Scaling allow you to provision
with precision. These services help lower your costs by responding in
real time to changes in demand—and they’re free to use: Compute Optimizer has
provided more than
Compute Optimizer
Over-provisioning resources can lead to unnecessary infrastructure costs, while under- 10 billion
provisioning can lead to poor application performance. Using ML to analyze historical utilization
metrics, Compute Optimizer recommends the optimal AWS resources for your workloads, recommendations
further reducing your infrastructure costs. With just a few clicks, it automatically generates since launch,
recommendations based on current utilization data, eliminating the need to invest time resulting in reduced
and resources to set up rule-based thresholds. Since its launch in December 2019, Compute
costs and improved
Optimizer has generated recommendations for more than 80 percent of Amazon EC2 usage
and provided more than 10 billion recommendations, resulting in reduced costs and improved
performance for a
performance for a variety of workloads. variety of workloads.

AWS Auto Scaling

AWS Auto Scaling monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain
steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. You can easily set up application
scaling for multiple resources across multiple services with a single intuitive interface
and maintain optimal application performance and availability even when workloads are
periodic, unpredictable, or continuously changing. When demand spikes, AWS Auto Scaling
automatically increases the capacity of constrained resources, so you can maintain a high
quality of service. When demand drops, it removes any excess resource capacity to help keep
you from overspending. There’s no need to add AWS Auto Scaling as a separate tool—it is
already built into AWS solutions.

20
Customer stories

21
C U ST O M E R ST O R IES

Ula builds a cost-effective, scalable

purchasing app for small businesses
About Ula
Ula is a B2B ecommerce marketplace app that serves Indonesia’s microenterprises. Customers
using Ula can order the products they need on their mobile phones and expect delivery within
two days.

The challenge
Ninety-eight percent of Indonesia’s economy comprises microenterprises, which continuously
suffer from inventory management, cash flow issues, inconsistent deliveries, or lack of delivery
options. Ula set out to build a cost-effective, scalable purchasing app and technology stack that
could overcome the challenges of basic mobile devices and poor network connections to serve
small businesses.

The AWS solution

Leveraging the AWS Well-Architected Tool, Ula accesses high availability and reliability from
the get-go. With Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), the startup can automate
orchestration at any scale to enable business expansion. It achieves cost-efficiency by leveraging
EC2 Spot Instances in its development, staging, and production environments.

The results
The app is at least one-third lighter than its competitors’, making it easier for MSMEs to
download and use in any setting. High availability ensures at least 99 percent uptime, while
scalable capabilities support a 300 times increase in business volume. Leveraging AWS services,
the startup saves 70 percent on monthly infrastructure costs.

Read the full story ›

22
C U ST O M E R ST O R IES

Fork Media achieves 40% lower costs

on AWS databases
About Fork Media
Fork Media is an India-based media tech company that offers “brand safety.” It deploys artificial
intelligence (AI) to understand the overall sentiment of a webpage before placing an ad for
its customers.

The challenge
Previously using two different cloud computing platforms, the company was challenged with
latency issues in servicing its media assets. Ranging from 500 milliseconds to one second,
this came in higher than its internal service level agreement (SLA) of 200 milliseconds.
The engineering team also faced challenges managing high query volumes for its
mission-critical database.

The AWS solution

To maximize ad visibility, Fork Media now consolidates its ad server databases on AWS.
It deploys Amazon RDS and Amazon EBS to automate database administration at scale.
CloudFront is utilized as a low-latency content delivery network (CDN), and it has adopted
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with Spot Instances to optimize costs and dynamically add capacity
when traffic spikes.

The results
It took Fork Media under three months to migrate two databases, including developing the
proof of concept and testing. With the integration of cloud-native solutions on AWS, the latency
between endpoints for serving any static advertising asset has dropped from 500 milliseconds
to only 50 milliseconds. In addition, Fork Media’s CPU consumption has decreased by 45 percent
since migrating to AWS Graviton2 processors.

Read the full story ›

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Inmagine migrates to AWS to enhance

operational efficiency
About Inmagine
Inmagine is a global creative ecosystem specializing in creative content, supplying designers
with ready-to-use stock content.

The challenge
Having experienced unpredictable web traffic patterns, unexpected distributed-denial-of-
service (DDoS) attacks, site reliability issues, and challenges with managing storage capacity,
Inmagine was seeking a new IT partner. The challenges it faced also escalated operational costs
and resulted in an overinvestment in compute capacity.

The AWS solution

To solve for these challenges, Inmagine migrated to AWS. To reduce operational uptime, the
startup leverages Application Load Balancers and Amazon EC2 Auto Recovery. Amazon S3
allows the startup to offload storage management and access the capacity, availability, and
reliability of AWS infrastructure. To protect dynamic content traffic, CloudFront and AWS WAF
solutions are deployed.

The results
The migration to AWS has resulted in a reduction of application performance degradation
by 34 percent. Instead of spending value resources on compute capacity, funding has
been reallocated to optimize and innovate new features for customers. With a 25 percent
improvement in loading times for dynamic content pages, Inmagine has seen an overall
increase in its site’s performance.

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Ramp scales its fast-growing finance

automation platform
About Ramp
Ramp, a B2B fintech startup, is a tech-first finance automation platform. Its serverless modern
application, in conjunction with its corporate card, allows businesses to manage their finances
more efficiently.

The challenge
To succeed, the startup needed a scalable modern architecture, high developer productivity, multi-
region availability, and optimized cloud costs. A bare-bones approach to cloud computing was not
going to work. With rising demand, it required sub-millisecond latency for Ramp’s caching needs.

The AWS solution

Ramp turned to AWS to build its platform’s core infrastructure utilizing Aurora database
clusters and ElastiCache for Redis to accelerate application and database performance. To
improve developer productivity, web servers run on Amazon ECS and Fargate. The startup uses
Amazon Aurora Global Database across regions with Aurora, which enables support across regions
to meet multi-region requirements. AWS Graviton processors are leveraged for Ramp’s databases to
performance relative to cost.

The results
AWS solutions provide the flexibility to meet demand and add components to increase system
robustness. Developer velocity across the organization has significantly increased with AWS. Cost-
optimization tools have allowed Ramp to decrease its cloud spend. AWS Activate is integrated into
the go-to-market strategy and has been instrumental from a product perspective.

Read the full story ›

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DataFarming processes data from

35 million acres
About DataFarming
DataFarming builds simple, low-cost precision agriculture solutions that allow farmers to access
data and gain insights. These can be incorporated into everyday farming activities.

The challenge
DataFarming was seeking to deliver high-quality data from satellite imagery faster and more
effectively to help farmers optimize their crop growth. Farmers would need to view their data on
mobile devices out in the field, where very limited bandwidth is common.

The AWS solution

DataFarming leveraged Amazon ECS to make it simple to deploy, manage, and scale containerized
applications. The company stores most of its image-based data in Amazon S3, which offers
industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. It leverages Spot Instances
to scale cost-effectively.

The results
Using AWS services, DataFarming built a solution that includes 28,000 farms and processes data
for 35 million acres of farmland. In just four years, the organization has achieved a 900 percent
increase in the use of satellite imagery in the Australian grains market. It successfully achieved 70
percent savings using Spot Instances compared to On-Demand pricing.

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Mayden increases reach and reliability

of healthcare software
About Mayden
Mayden is a UK healthcare technology company that provides technology for mental healthcare
services as part of the National Health Service (NHS).

The challenge
Mayden was seeking more stability from a new cloud provider. It required expertise and support to
migrate efficiently without disrupting service for patients and care providers.

The AWS solution

Mayden migrated using AWS Application Migration Service, which minimizes time-intensive, error-
prone manual processes by automatically converting customer source servers to run natively on
AWS. Cloud Migration Factory on AWS was leveraged to coordinate and automate the large-scale
migration. By deploying AWS Managed Services, including Amazon Route 53 and Amazon Elastic
Load Balancing (ELB), its team is now free to focus on building and supporting its applications.

The results
Mayden migrated 300 servers to AWS in just six weeks with minimal downtime during cross-cloud
replication of servers. Since migrating to AWS, Mayden has not experienced any major service
issues. Partnering with AWS, the IT team can perform faster, building the 75 database servers that
make up a key part of Mayden’s infrastructure in just two minutes and making it 98 percent faster
to build database servers on AWS.

Read the full story ›

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Start maximizing your

savings now
With innovations in silicon and serverless technologies and a variety of flexible
pricing options, AWS is committed to helping your startup get the most from its
cloud infrastructure spend. We provide you with the capability to optimize your
costs while building modern, scalable applications to meet your startup needs.
The breadth of services and pricing models demonstrates our commitment to
giving you all the compute performance and capacity you require at the lowest
cost—now and as your startup grows.

Start improving your application performance today and reach your highest
savings potential with AWS.

Discover all the ways AWS can help you focus on innovation while
lowering your costs.

Explore our startup cost-optimization hub ›

Gain access to free tools, resources, and expert support.

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