Sheba.xyz is a leading online service marketplace in Bangladesh, connecting users with a wide range of professional services, including home repairs, cleaning, beauty, and maintenance. Established to provide convenience to everyday life, Sheba.xyz has grown to serve a large user base, accommodating millions of service requests monthly through its platform. With its rapid growth, the platform demands robust and scalable infrastructure to ensure a seamless user experience. Sheba.xyz relies heavily on cloud infrastructure, primarily hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services), to handle the dynamic needs of its operations, including peak traffic and high data storage.

While Sheba.xyz’s AWS infrastructure provided flexibility and scalability, the lack of optimized practices and resource management led to rising infrastructure costs. This case study examines the challenges faced by Sheba.xyz, the solution implemented, and the outcome of the project, which dramatically reduced their monthly AWS expenditure while enhancing operational efficiency.

As Sheba.xyz scaled, the company faced significant challenges related to its AWS infrastructure:

• High Infrastructure Costs: AWS billing had escalated to around $12,000 per month. Despite the growing operational demands, the costs were not being managed effectively. A lack of best practices in managing AWS services was one of the key contributors to the high costs.

• Underutilized Resources: The AWS environment was over-provisioned. Several instances of services like EC2, EBS, and ALB were either underutilized or stopped but still incur costs.

• Outdated Storage and Snapshots: Sheba.xyz was retaining unnecessary older snapshots of EBS and RDS instances, driving up storage costs. Furthermore, the existing EBS type used (GP2) was less cost-efficient compared to newer options.

• Lack of Cost Optimization Strategies: Cost-saving techniques like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances had not been applied, leaving the infrastructure vulnerable to unpredictable and high monthly charges.

• Inefficient Database Management: Sheba.xyz was utilizing Amazon Aurora MySQL, which was incurring higher costs than needed. They were not taking full advantage of cheaper yet equally reliable database options available within AWS.

To address the challenges faced by Sheba.xyz, a thorough audit of their AWS infrastructure was conducted, focusing on resource elimination, storage optimization, and cost efficiency improvements. A key part of this strategy was optimizing their EC2 instances. Several underutilized, smaller instances were merged into fewer, larger ones to enhance performance and reduce operational overhead. Stopped instances that continued to incur costs were removed, and AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances were applied to instances with consistent usage patterns, lowering the monthly spend. In addition, redundant Application Load Balancers (ALBs) were decommissioned, and the remaining ALBs were optimized to handle traffic more efficiently.

For storage, Sheba.xyz tackled EBS (Elastic Block Store) inefficiencies by reviewing older volumes, removing outdated or unnecessary ones, and migrating from GP2 to GP3 volumes. The GP3 volumes provided better cost efficiency while offering improved IOPS, ensuring performance remained high without escalating costs. Each EBS volume was assigned the appropriate IOPS to balance performance needs with expenditure. Further storage optimization included cleaning up outdated EBS and RDS snapshots, which had accumulated and unnecessarily increased storage costs over time. To streamline database management, Sheba.xyz migrated from the more expensive Aurora MySQL to RDS MySQL using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), retaining performance and reliability at a much lower cost.

In terms of networking and overall system monitoring, Route53 and VPC configurations were optimized to enhance traffic routing and reduce latency. To provide real-time cost monitoring, AWS CloudWatch was integrated, allowing Sheba.xyz to track performance metrics and receive billing alerts to prevent cost overruns. Additionally, ACM (AWS Certificate Manager) was utilized for managing SSL/TLS certificates, ensuring secure web service management at minimal cost. These steps collectively brought a significant reduction in the infrastructure expenses, while maintaining the scalability, security, and performance required by Sheba.xyz’s rapidly expanding business.

Project Outcome

Following the implementation of these strategies, Sheba.xyz saw immediate and substantial cost savings on their AWS infrastructure. The monthly bill, which previously stood at $12,000, dropped to $6,000 after the first phase of optimization. Further ongoing actions are expected to bring the bill down to approximately $4,500, representing a 62.5% reduction in monthly AWS costs.

Key Benefits:

1. Improved Resource Utilization: Consolidation of instances and storage led to more efficient use of resources without compromising performance.
2. Enhanced Infrastructure Management: With cost monitoring tools and automated alerts in place, Sheba.xyz now has better visibility into their AWS spend and resource utilization.
3. Scalable and Reliable Infrastructure: The optimized infrastructure supports future growth while maintaining high availability, reliability, and performance.
4. Significant Cost Reduction: A 50% cost reduction was achieved within the first month, with a target to further reduce costs by an additional 25%.

Conclusion

Sheba.xyz’s journey toward optimizing its cloud infrastructure has been transformative. By adopting best practices, eliminating waste, and leveraging AWS’s cost-saving features, Sheba.xyz is now well-positioned to manage its cloud infrastructure efficiently and scale for future growth. This strategic approach not only ensures that the platform can handle increased user demand but also significantly reduces the cost burden, allowing Sheba.xyz to reinvest in enhancing customer experiences and expanding service offerings.