Use case
Achieving $300 Monthly Savings with Automated EKS and RDS Start/Stop Using GitHub Actions
- Lakshya Chhajed
About the Customer
SkillForge is a global funding and trading company that provides trading services for financial markets. Their platform offers opportunities for traders to get funded by showcasing their skills in real-time market environments. To support their infrastructure, SkillForge uses various cloud-native solutions, including Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) and RDS (Relational Database Service), to manage their development and staging environments.
Customer Challenge
SkillForge faced the challenge of incurring unnecessary costs by keeping their Amazon EKS environments and associated RDS instances running during periods of low activity, such as nights and weekends. The manual processes required to start and stop these environments introduced the risk of human error and inefficiencies, affecting the team’s ability to focus on higher-value tasks. They needed an automated solution to ensure their environments were only running when needed, reducing operational costs and improving resource management.
Without automation, the continuous operation of these environments during off-hours led to excessive cloud costs, and manual intervention often resulted in delays and errors in shutting down or starting services. This presented a need to streamline the process and implement automated workflows to manage these resources efficiently.
Solution
IAMOPS implemented a series of GitHub Actions workflows to automate the start and stop of SkillForge’s EKS environment and associated RDS instances. This solution utilized GitHub Actions integrated with AWS to provide a seamless and cost-effective automation mechanism.
Scheduled Start Workflow:
This workflow was triggered by a scheduled event, such as the start of a workday. The workflow checked the status of the EKS environment and RDS instances, and if the services were inactive, it scaled up the EC2 Auto Scaling group and started the necessary services.
Scheduled Stop Workflow:
At the end of each workday or during weekends, this workflow automatically shut down the EKS environment and stopped the RDS instances. It ensured that the Auto Scaling group’s replica count was reduced to zero, preventing unnecessary resource utilization during off-hours.
Manual Start Workflow:
- This workflow allowed developers to manually trigger the start of the EKS environment and RDS instances when needed. The manual trigger ensured flexibility for the DevOps team while maintaining control over the resource usage.
Each workflow was designed with security best practices in mind, utilizing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) within the EKS cluster to manage permissions. Additionally, the solution leveraged secure GitHub Actions within a private repository to automate these processes while adhering to organizational security policies.
Below is the flow diagram illustrating the architecture of the implemented solution:
Semantic Release Workflow
Results & Benefits
The automation of the start/stop processes for EKS and RDS environments led to several key outcomes:
- Cost Savings: By ensuring that the environments were only active during working hours, SkillForge significantly reduced their AWS costs. By automating the start/stop process for the staging EKS environment, we’ve achieved an estimated monthly savings of up to $300 on AWS. The solution optimized resource utilization, and the savings far outweighed the costs of implementing and maintaining the automation.
- Operational Efficiency: Automation eliminated the need for manual intervention, reducing the risk of human error and freeing up time for the DevOps team to focus on other critical tasks.
- Improved Consistency and Reliability: The automated workflows ensured that environments were consistently started and stopped in the correct order, preventing potential issues caused by incorrect manual processes.
- Enhanced Security: The use of GitHub Actions within a private repository, combined with proper access controls and secure RBAC policies, ensured that the automation adhered to security best practices.
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, and Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
