What If Media Group trusts CloudFix for nonstop AWS cost optimization
We were blown away. (With CloudFix), we found hundreds of thousands of dollars before re:Invent was over.
John Pershing, CTO
What If Media Group
The performance marketing company identified over $250k in savings in its first scan alone – and hasn’t stopped since
What If Media Group, a multi-million dollar performance marketing organization with almost 200 employees, enables the world’s leading brands to acquire valuable new customers at scale. Through AI, data science, and an extensive network of proprietary media channels, What If helps customers like Uber, Clorox, and Nationwide Insurance achieve meaningful customer experiences and powerful business performance.
To support its data-driven approach to performance marketing, What If relies on four separate Product Engineering groups to develop custom AWS-native applications. The What If team deeply values AWS and relies on it to power the business, but found themselves with growing cost control challenges. What If needed a more reliable, efficient way to manage AWS spend – and at AWS re:Invent 2022, they found CloudFix.
“Spend now, ask questions later”: As What If grows, so do its AWS costs
After a series of mergers and acquisitions, What If CTO John Pershing faced the difficulty of managing and combining several heterogeneous tech ecosystems. The only common denominator was AWS, but as the business has scaled, so did their costs. “AWS makes it easy to spend money now and ask questions later,” Pershing shared. While that’s great for innovation – Pershing empowers his engineers to build what they need to move the business forward – it also introduces the need to more tightly control their spend.
The problem for What If wasn’t identifying ways to reduce costs; it was putting them into practice. “It’s relatively simple to find ways to cut back on your AWS bills,” Pershing explained. “But those changes, like upgrading Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes to newer versions, for example, are very labor intensive. Our engineering teams would sink an incredible amount of time into performing the fixes, but the return would be just a one-time saving.”
Pershing knew that manually keeping pace with AWS was unrealistic. “In a dynamic, ever-changing cloud environment, one-and-done fixes only do so much. AWS is always changing, and we’re always spinning up new resources. Plus, they issue 50+ new service advisories every week. We just can’t keep up.” In addition, manually regulating their AWS spend proved far too resource intensive. Many team members lacked the technical and financial acumen to make optimal decisions, and Pershing needed to allocate those that did to higher-value initiatives.
“We were blown away”: CloudFix finds over $250k in savings in its initial scan
In late 2022, Pershing began to search for a cloud cost management solution that could find and realize new savings around the clock. What If had hit $5 million in annualized AWS spend and continued to grow. Manual cost optimization was no longer enough.
We were blown away. (With CloudFix), we found hundreds of thousands of dollars before re:Invent was over.
John Pershing and his team came to Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2022 with FinOps tooling in mind and soon connected with CloudFix. “We were initially attracted to CloudFix’s simple, flat-fee pricing because most FinOps tools take a percentage of a company’s annualized AWS spend,” Pershing said. They also liked how CloudFix automatically finds and fixes AWS cost optimization opportunities in an ongoing way, which would allow their engineers to focus on bigger, more impactful projects.
According to Pershing, “We decided to complete the CloudFix free savings assessment right there in Vegas. Our preliminary research indicated it was secure, and we were curious what it would find.” Because the What If team had been manually optimizing their AWS spend, they didn’t expect to see significant savings.
To their surprise, CloudFix identified $263,000 in immediate savings with a projected value of almost $500,000 over the next 12 months across their 32 accounts. “We were blown away,” Pershing laughed. “We found hundreds of thousands of dollars before re:Invent was over, mostly through the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon DynamoDB fixers. CloudFix was fast, easy to use, and simple to configure. It let us consolidate our cost optimization efforts across the organization and get our engineers back to high-value work.”
CloudFix is fast, easy to use, and simple to configure. It lets us consolidate our cost optimization efforts across the organization and get our engineers back to high-value work.
With CloudFix, What If Media Group gets automated, nonstop savings
What If has saved over $144,000 to date without impacting performance or availability. Pershing concluded, “CloudFix far exceeded our expectations. We’re excited to see our savings continue to grow as AWS releases new savings opportunities and CloudFix automates them. CloudFix has helped us achieve a continuous FinOps practice – not just one-off savings, but an end-to-end process for cost management.”
What’s next for What If? The team plans to implement the latest fixers and deploy CloudFix to any remaining accounts to realize CloudFix’s projected annual value. They’re looking forward to effortlessly keeping up with AWS best practices, too. With CloudFix, What If Media Group is confident that they can continue to support their engineers, grow their business, and keep AWS costs under control.
CloudFix far exceeded our expectations. We’re excited to see our savings continue to grow as AWS releases new savings opportunities and CloudFix automates them. CloudFix has helped us achieve a continuous FinOps practice – not just one-off savings, but an end-to-end process for cost management.
