Highlights

• Over 85% cost savings
• Purpose-built architecture for future-resilience
• Well-managed scalability to take care of future growth
• 50% cost savings unlocked from improved database performance  
• Well-architected AWS cloud infrastructure mapped to the business needs with no idle capacity

Overview

XP India is a freight transporter and supply chain enabler, providing reliable logistics for retailers and bulk commodity shippers. With over 9.6 million deliveries and real-time tracking, XP India is a one-stop shop for reliable supply chain solutions.  

Requirements

After deploying in-house, on-premises infrastructure for their operations, XP India migrated to the AWS cloud with high-configuration compute resources for their application as well as the MS SQL database. However, their performance was not up to the mark, and infrastructure costs had skyrocketed. They wanted to:

1. Reduce costs by optimizing architecture

2. Enhance EC2 instance performance.  

3. Reduce database performance issues

4. Rationalize AWS compute instances for performance and cost-efficiency

What XP India needed was a partner who could help them optimize their cloud platform and help them realise the benefits of AWS.  

Solution

Velocis, being an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner with extensive experience in developing applications, was an ideal partner for XP India. Our team swiftly analysed XP India’s AWS landscape and identified the areas of improvement:

• Based on the last 45 days’ utilisation and trends analysis, it was observed that the XP India team was using over-provisioned EC2 instances, almost 8x of what was required
• There were expensive, underutilised services active in their AWS infra, which could easily be eliminated without impact on business or application performance
• While the AWS RDS was the right choice for database management, the storage family chosen was incurring huge costs in their monthly charges which could be significantly optimised
• Previously, there were a few database queries that resulted in unresponsive applications. Introduction of an APM tool like New Relic provided clarity on their database operations.  

After gathering all the insights and areas of improvements, we implemented our solution:

1. EC2 instances were optimised in the first phase itself, resulting in immediate cost savings

2. The current c6i.8xlarge Intel processer with 32 cores and 64 GB of RAM was reduced to an AMD processor, M Series instance with a 4-core, 16 GB memory, without impact to business or performance

3. The databases were optimised to eliminate the previously recurring unresponsiveness in the instance.  

4. The storage type was changed from the expensive io1 to GP3, with a trial run scheduled to monitor performance and observe for issues  

5. Improved the XP-India landscape using the AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars of Operational Excellence, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization

Business outcomes

Within two weeks of project commencement, Velocis demonstrated tremendous cost reduction for the customer. In addition, the incidents of unresponsiveness in the application were quickly resolved, resulting in the XP India EC2 and RDS instances performing as expected and being able to scale up when required. Additionally, XP India’s application portal was now secured from cyber threats with AWS WAF. These changes allowed them to scale up seamlessly, achieve operational excellence, improve sustainability, and eliminate waste and undifferentiated heavy lifting. Some of the key business outcomes include:  

1. An immediate 85% reduction in the compute resources

2. An additional 50% reduction in storage costs with the downgrade of AWS RDS database storage class

3. Improved application availability and responsiveness because of significant optimisation of database operations.

4. A clear roadmap to future scaling up of the instances, allowing XP India to analyse and attribute their expenditure and implement effective cloud financial management

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