How Academia.edu Reduced Cloud Costs While Modernizing Kubernetes with nOps

Overview

Academia.edu is a global research platform used by researchers, scholars, and students to share and discover academic work. As the platform scaled, the company needed to modernize its AWS infrastructure while maintaining control over cloud costs. By partnering with nOps, Academia.edu gained the flexibility to optimize cloud spending without over-committing during its transition to Kubernetes.

The Challenge

Before nOps, Academia.edu was dealing with rising cloud costs driven by a large AWS footprint and continued growth. At the same time, the engineering team was modernizing services by migrating from ECS to EKS. Traditional commitment strategies made it hard to save without taking on long-term commitments that could become inefficient as workloads evolved. Limited visibility into Kubernetes costs during the migration added additional risk to optimization.

The Solution

nOps helped Academia.edu leverage Commitment Management to optimize savings while preserving flexibility during architectural changes. This gave the team confidence to modernize infrastructure without over-committing as workloads changed. Kubernetes Cost Visibility gave the team insight into container- and node-level usage as services migrated from ECS to EKS. Centralized Cost Reporting helped Academia.edu track cloud spend across accounts and identify optimization opportunities.

"nOps gave us the flexibility we needed to modernize our infrastructure while still controlling costs. We didn’t have to choose between savings and agility."

— Nate Sullivan, CTO, Academia.edu

Business Impact

• Reduced cloud costs while migrating from ECS to EKS
• Improved confidence in commitment decisions during infrastructure modernization
• Greater visibility into Kubernetes usage during the transition to EKS
• Better cost control through centralized reporting across AWS accounts
• Increased confidence in long-term cloud cost planning
  

“With nOps, we’re able to manage cloud costs proactively as our platform and infrastructure continue to evolve.”

— Mike Cooper, Infrastructure Team Lead, Academia.edu