Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Reinvent your cloud strategy: Optimize performance & cut cloud costs (CON326)

Summary

Kegan Kingmann from GrainLate and Tom Brown from Snap Inc. discuss Snap's cloud optimization journey.
Snap, with 750 million monthly active users, faces challenges such as handling large-scale usage, traffic fluctuations, and rising cloud costs.
Snap's engineering values include moving fast with precision, focusing on user well-being, and maintaining strict privacy standards.
Snap uses AWS Cloud Compute, particularly EKS for Kubernetes and Amazon S3 for storage, to manage scalability and fault tolerance.
Snap implemented various manual optimization strategies like PGO, container rightsizing, and cloud governance but found them labor-intensive and unsustainable.
Granulate, a real-time continuous optimization solution, was introduced to automate and scale optimization efforts.
Granulate's agent-based solution focuses on runtime optimization and orchestration, leading to improved performance and cost reduction.
Snap deployed Granulate on 350,000 vCores, resulting in significant cost savings and reduced CPU usage.
The integration of Granulate into Snap's ecosystem changed their approach to optimization, allowing them to focus on both expansive and smaller services.
Future plans include leveraging Granulate for big data workloads and capacity optimization.

Snap's reliance on manual optimization strategies was not sustainable due to the scale and complexity of their services.
Granulate's agent-based optimization provides a scalable and automated solution that complements Snap's existing AWS infrastructure.
The integration of Granulate into Snap's operations has led to a cultural shift in how they approach optimization, emphasizing automation and efficiency.
The success of Granulate's deployment at Snap suggests that other companies with similar challenges could benefit from such optimization solutions.
The discussion highlights the importance of continuous optimization and the potential for cost savings even after initial cloud migration and setup.
The partnership between Snap and Granulate demonstrates the value of collaboration between cloud service providers and optimization solution vendors.
The session underscores the ongoing need for companies to reassess and update their cloud strategies to manage costs effectively while maintaining performance.