Use case
Cost-Effective Infrastructure Management with Spot Capacity and Automation
- Jils Vaghasiya
About the Customer
Agrivon is a global technology innovator developing Africa’s first financial super-app for the agricultural sector. The platform empowers agribusinesses with integrated money management, digital payments, and access to financing, fueled by intelligent machine learning that tailors financial products to user needs. Agrimon simplifies agribusiness operations from cash flow and operations to network and financing management, equipping users to make smarter, more informed decisions.
Customer Challenge
Agrivon operated four separate environments—Development, QA, Staging, and Production—on AWS ECS Fargate. The Dev, QA, and Staging environments were non-production but always utilized Fargate On-Demand capacity, leading to significant recurring infrastructure costs.
Key challenges included:
- Excessive infrastructure costs, with non-production environments driving up spending.
- Idle environments during off-hours yet lacking automation to shut down when unused.
- Need for cost reduction without compromising the pace and effectiveness of development and QA workflows.
- Developer flexibility requirements, allowing teams to spin environments up or down on demand.
Without intervention, these inefficiencies threatened increasing monthly costs and undermined resource optimization.
Solution
To address these pain points, IAMOPS implemented a two-pronged strategy featuring cost-efficient capacity management and smart automation—ensuring both financial efficiency and operational agility.
1. ECS Fargate Spot Migration
- Proof of Concept (PoC): Executed in the Dev environment to evaluate Spot instance behavior under interruption scenarios.
- Full Rollout: Extended to QA and Staging for all non-production services.
- Capacity Provider Strategy: Configured ECS with Spot-first preference and fallback to On-Demand, safeguarding against capacity disruptions.
2. Scheduled Environment Automation
- AWS Native Architecture: Leveraged AWS Lambda, EventBridge, and API Gateway to orchestrate startup/shutdown of ECS services, RDS, and observability stack (Grafana, Loki, Mimir) according to business hours.
- Visibility & Alerts: Integrated Slack notifications for environment state changes and Spot interruption incidents.
3. Developer Flexibility Enablement
- Manual Control Endpoints: Published API endpoints that allow developers to override schedule and manually start/stop environments, offering on-demand flexibility without manual intervention or delay.
4. Spot Interruption Monitoring
- Event-Driven Alerts: Set up EventBridge rules and CloudWatch alarms to detect Spot interruptions, enabling proactive alerting in Slack to inform operators immediately.
Results & Benefits
- Cost Reduction: Achieved over 75% cost savings in non-production environments.
- Overall Financial Impact: Delivered approximately 35% reduction in total monthly AWS expenditure.
- Operational Continuity: No disruption observed in development or testing pipelines post-migration.
- Improved Efficiency: Automated lifecycle management and fallback provisions elevated operational excellence.
- Enhanced Developer Experience: Realized flexibility through manual override APIs without compromising cost controls.
- Governance & Monitoring: Real-time monitoring of Spot events preserved cost-savvy operations and ensured resilience.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full DevOps suite company that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and Reseller, we focus on two key pillars: Professionalism by adhering to best practices and utilizing advanced technologies, Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
