BENlabs Partners with nOps to Optimize AWS Costs and Improve Visibility

Overview

BENlabs is an entertainment marketing company with purpose-built AI tech designed to help brands and creators interpret data from the places where their target audiences are engaged most – entertainment and social media platforms -- to increase the impact of their content and campaigns. The company has a dedicated team of data scientists and engineers working to build impactful AI solutions. However, rapid growth and data consumption led to a significant increase in AWS cloud costs, necessitating a robust cost management solution.

The Challenge

As BENlabs expanded its operations and leaned into widespread applications of its AI technology for its brand and creator clients, their AWS cloud costs doubled in 6 months. Managing and understanding costs across a team of 60 engineers with numerous AWS accounts became nearly impossible. Engineers lacked visibility into their costs and didn’t have time to report across all their accounts, which led to inefficiencies and uncontrolled spending. The massive increase in spending prompted BENlabs to look for a way to manage and control their AWS costs.

The Solution

After exploring multiple options on their own, BENlabs decided to work with nOps, a provider AWS recommended to BENlabs. The onboarding process was seamless, and BENlabs was able to quickly implement FinOps into their organization. The following nOps products were instrumental in addressing their needs:

• nOps Business Contexts: Business Contexts provided BENlabs with better cost visibility and made it easy to connect their AWS costs back to their business. Setting up cost tracking dashboards became significantly easier and faster compared to other available tools.
• nOps Compute Copilot: This solution helped BENlabs continually optimize their Auto Scaling Group Workloads spiky workloads above their commitment level, ensuring efficient resource utilization.
• nOps Commitment Management: nOps AI-driven Commitment Management removes the guesswork of selecting the right commitment level and ensures you fully utilize 100% your commitments, guaranteed.

“Working with nOps has been great! Their team really knows FinOps and we’ve learned a lot of new ways to analyze our AWS costs and identify ways to reduce our monthly spend. Now, it’s easy to quickly report on our costs and how it’s connected back to the business.”

Andy Kwan, Senior Director of Infrastructure at BENlabs

Business Impact

With nOps, BENlabs is saving 22% over On-Demand pricing and achieved several key outcomes:

1. Enhanced Visibility: Engineers gained clear insights into their spending, allowing for better cost management and accountability across teams. The intuitive dashboards made it easy to track and analyze costs by account, service, type, and any other filter you could need.
2. Reduced Costs: By leveraging nOps’ automated commitment management and Compute Copilot, BENlabs significantly reduced their AWS costs. On average, they are saving nearly 22% compared to On-Demand costs each month. Compute Copilot made it seamless for them to take advantage of Spot with their Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) once their commitments were fully utilized. This dramatically reduced their On-Demand costs.
3. Improved Spot Stability: Compute Copilot automatically places BENlabs on the most reliable Spot instances and results in over 99% reliability by maximizing instance diversification.
4. Time Savings: Setting up cost tracking and optimization dashboards with nOps was much quicker compared to building custom solutions. This saved BENlabs valuable engineering time, allowing them to focus on their core AI projects.

“nOps provided the visibility and control we needed to optimize our AWS costs without long-term commitments. The automated platform reduced our On-Demand spend significantly while offering tremendous flexibility. I highly recommend nOps for cloud optimization and managing cloud costs effectively.”

Andy Kwan, Senior Director of Infrastructure at BENlabs