AWS cloud cost optimization success

This case study highlights a successful cost optimization analysis conducted by StratusGrid, leveraging our product Stratusphere™ FinOps and other tooling for our long-time customer, Crunchyroll.

The project's primary objective was to identify potential cost savings and an optimal subset for remediation in a complex environment across multiple AWS cloud organizations. This case study provides a detailed account of the project's execution, outcomes, and the value generated for Crunchyroll.

About Crunchyroll

Learn about our voyage with Crunchyroll, the ultimate anime destination for fans, as they tackled escalating cloud costs in a complex environment with over 40 accounts in multiple AWS organizations. Understand how we used our unique product, Stratusphere™ FinOps, to bring unified visibility across multiple AWS organizations. Read about the commitment and configuration-based savings identified, the ease of onboarding into the platform, and the ability to immediately execute on findings.  

The challenge

Crunchyroll is the leading destination for anime fans, anchored by a global streaming service and supporting anime theatrical films, games, manga, events, e-commerce, collectibles, home entertainment, and merchandising.

They have experienced massive growth over the past few years, leading to user growth and higher demand. With it, the complexity of their platform has increased, creating infrastructure among many platforms spread across over 40 accounts in multiple AWS organizations without consolidated visibility.

In parallel, there are internal transformations in the engineering organization, which are increasing the number of deployments happening in parallel, expanding the product across multiple geographical regions, consolidating infrastructures, and constantly increasing product development velocity, all of which make consolidated visibility even more important.

To address these needs, they partnered with StratusGrid to utilize our unique product, Stratusphere™ FinOps, alongside our professional services to gain visibility and rapidly identify ways for Crunchyroll to optimize their cloud infrastructure and reduce operational expenses across all of their AWS Cloud environments.

The solution

Our team successfully onboarded Crunchyroll onto Stratusphere™ FinOps, our cloud financial analysis and cost optimization tool. This onboarding was achieved in less than one (1) hour per organization by utilizing Stratusphere™ FinOps’s CloudFormation deployment method.

Once onboarded, Stratusphere™ FinOps provided a consolidated view of AWS usage costs and potential cost optimization findings across all AWS organizations. StratusGrid was able to use the findings and Level of Effort categorization provided by Stratusphere™ FinOps, along with other tooling and team member expertise, to identify significant cost optimization potential.

StratusGrid presented the assessment results and a prioritized plan to resolve the most impactful findings across the environment based on the potential savings, platform, and Level of Effort (LoE) required for the remediation of each finding.

Results & outcomes:

Total savings:

The cost optimization plan we delivered to Crunchyroll identified 5x actual monthly savings compared to month 1. The optimal findings were addressed based on their potential savings relative to their LoE.

Commitment-based savings:

1.5x total actual monthly savings compared to month 1 in commitment-based findings were addressed by optimizing reserved instances and savings plans.

Configuration-based savings:

3x total actual monthly savings compared to month 1 in configuration-based findings were addressed by eliminating unused infrastructure, right-sizing infrastructure, optimizing storage configurations, adjusting auto-scaling parameters, and fine-tuning cloud environments to align usage with need better.

Net monthly savings:

After factoring in ongoing costs associated with Stratusphere™ FinOps and other tools utilized in the project, the net monthly savings potential for Crunchyroll is projected to be  4x compared to month 1. This substantial cost reduction proves the effectiveness of the implemented strategies and the value generated for the organization.

Quick wins:

Thanks to Stratusphere™ FinOps's identification of many low level-of-effort findings, Crunchyroll was able to immediately resolve .2x total actual savings per month compared to month 1 in configuration-based findings remediated on the first day of reviewing the data.