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FinanceCloud

Fintech Platform Reduces Cloud Costs 40%

B2B Financial Services Platform
New York, NY
120 employees
4 months
40%
cost reduction
Started:Jan 2024
Duration:4 months
Completed:May 2024

The Challenge

PaymentFlow, a B2B payment processing platform handling $2B in annual transactions, had grown their AWS infrastructure organically over 4 years. What started as a simple architecture had become a sprawling environment with 400+ EC2 instances, 50+ RDS databases, and dozens of untracked services.

Monthly AWS bills had ballooned from $45K to $180K without corresponding business growth. The engineering team suspected significant waste but lacked visibility into where costs were accumulating. Their attempts to optimize were frustrated by the fear of impacting production systems.

Reliability was also suffering-the platform experienced 3-4 incidents per month, each costing an estimated $50K in lost transaction fees and customer trust. The board demanded a 30% cost reduction while simultaneously improving reliability, creating seemingly conflicting objectives.

Our Approach

1

Infrastructure Discovery & Analysis

Week 1-3

Deployed cost intelligence tools to map all AWS resources, identify ownership, and establish usage patterns. Discovered 127 orphaned resources and 45% average instance utilization.

2

Quick Wins & Waste Elimination

Week 3-6

Terminated orphaned resources, right-sized over-provisioned instances, and implemented S3 lifecycle policies. Achieved 20% savings in first month.

3

Architecture Optimization

Week 6-12

Migrated stateless workloads to spot instances with fallback, implemented auto-scaling, and consolidated databases. Improved reliability through redundancy.

4

FinOps Program Establishment

Week 12-16

Implemented tagging strategy, cost allocation by team/product, real-time dashboards, and anomaly alerting. Trained team on sustainable optimization practices.

Solution Overview

Infrastructure audit, right-sizing analysis, reserved instance strategy, spot instance implementation, and FinOps practices with automated cost monitoring dashboards.

The Results

Reduced cloud costs by 40% ($72K/month savings)
Improved uptime from 99.5% to 99.99%
Implemented cost allocation and showback
Established FinOps processes for ongoing optimization

Business Impact

Cost Savings
$864K annual savings ($72K/month)
Productivity Gain
Engineering time on cost issues reduced 90%
Risk Reduction
Incidents reduced from 4/month to <1/month

"PlatOps found inefficiencies we didn't know existed. The cost savings pay for their services several times over."

M
Michael Torres, VP of Engineering
B2B Financial Services Platform

"The improved reliability was unexpected. By eliminating waste and over-provisioning, we actually built a more resilient system."

J
Jennifer Walsh, CTO
B2B Financial Services Platform

Key Takeaways

  • Most organizations have 25-40% cloud waste hiding in plain sight
  • Right-sizing alone typically yields 15-25% savings
  • Spot instances can reduce compute costs 60-80% for appropriate workloads
  • FinOps culture is as important as technical optimization

Key Outcome

40%
cost reduction

Technologies Used

AWS Cost ExplorerCloudHealthTerraformSpot.ioDatadog

Compliance Frameworks

SOC 2 Type IIPCI-DSS

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