appflame Leverages Uniskai to Enhance Cloud Visibility and Cut Cloud Costs

Customer profile

appflame is an employer brand Hily and Taimi use to employ specialists for their back offices in Ukraine. Hily is a dating app with 27 million users and Taimi is an inclusive LGBTQ+ dating app with over 17 million clients worldwide. Both products’ development speed and focus on results are their biggest advantages.

Partnership goals

With its huge cloud spread, appflame needed to find a solution to optimize cloud costs to maximize business benefits and was looking for a unified AI-based cloud platform to monitor, manage, optimize, and protect cloud infrastructure. Its ‘wish list’ for any partnership included the following:

  • To be able to manage multiple AWS accounts for separate projects – something that appflame had always found challenging. Its DevOps team clearly needed a tool to visualize the company’s complex cloud architecture through precise, up-to-the-minute diagrams in order to keep an eye on its cloud infrastructure performance.

  • To be able to utilize the most appropriate instance types and sizes matching the application’s performance requirements at the optimal price.

  • To have at its fingertips information on how many reserved instances (RIs) to purchase. While native AWS tools did give some tips on RIs, appflame found they weren’t able to provide the constant monitoring and optimization needed to guarantee 100% utilization of the RIs.

  • To enjoy security automation and alerting across all its AWS accounts and help its DevOps teams avoid risks and safeguard sensitive information.

The appflame DevOps team had been testing different solutions, both open source and commercial, as well as native AWS tools. Some of them offered partial help, but the team was still swamped with heavy cloud bills. And then Uniskai by Profisea Labs came along.

Achieving goals

Uniskai’s comprehensive AI-based platform fitted appflame perfectly, and its adoption was painless and fast.

  • Managing multiple AWS accounts. Uniskai’s Dashboard gathers all the available information about appflame’s cloud infrastructure in one place. Also, Uniskai by Profisea Labs provides weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly reports to see and review all cloud costs to monitor whether they are rising or falling and indeed to know exactly what is happening in the infrastructure at that moment. The Cloudview feature offers information about cloud resources through fully interactive infrastructure service lists, maps, and architecture diagrams. The platform identifies archived or backed-up Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that the company was paying for but not using. With Uniskai’s Waste Manager, those wasted cloud resources were revealed and removed, improving cloud infrastructure overall and reducing appflame’s cloud spend.

  • Tagging & Schemes Using the Uniskai tagging feature allows tracking of the cloud resources used by different teams to prevent misuse or overuse and empower managers to make informed decisions. As they may be working concurrently on several projects, appflame engineers had to spend days manually drawing every instance, every dependency between the database and the server, etc. Now, they simply open Cloudview where they can easily audit cloud performance by viewing the automatically created layouts of the entire cloud infrastructure.

  • Rightsizing EC2 and ECS instances. Uniskai analyzes metrics from every source, identifies cost and performance drivers, and gives a comprehensive outlook of the resources to be rightsized. Uniskai’s rightsizing is not a one-off action: since the cloud is a dynamic environment, Uniskai always finds new instances to upgrade or downgrade.

  • Reserving instances. Thanks to Uniskai, appflame was able to start using real-time tips on RI purchases and convertible RI configurations to buy the right resources easily and maximize budget savings. appflame already had a one-year Reservation plan in place which worked, but the savings made were disappointing. According to Uniskai’s recommendations, the team created a 3-year Reservation plan, with a very good figure of how much money they will save.

  • Ultimate Security. As strong security and personal privacy are appflame’s top concerns, security recommendations and alerting were one of the main requirements for the product. Uniskai’s Cloudguard provides DevOps engineers with a total audit to improve the safety of multiple AWS accounts. This AI-based feature notifies about deprecated resources and out-of-date keys and passwords, etc.

Uniskai features used by appflame

Cloudview, Cloudlist, Cloudnet, Cloudmap, Billing, Waste Manager, Rightsizing, Cloudsitter, Cloudguard, Account Manager, Tags, Reports, Schemes.

Results

  • appflame now orchestrates a multi-account AWS environment with no pain while ensuring top security and best practices across all its existing and future AWS accounts.

  • Uniskai’s unique algorithms optimize appflame’s cloud infrastructure 24x7, matching resources and workload demands constantly.

  • appflame’s DevOps teams no longer spend hours collecting, monitoring, and analyzing metrics in order to perform manual and routine actions for cloud cost optimization.

  • The process of smart planning increased appflame’s productivity in general. Now, all the teams are aligned without taking on tasks randomly within projects.

  • appflame has freed up time and budget which can be better spent in product innovation. DevOps engineers no longer need to respond to changes in the cloud environment. Instead, they can confidently leave all the heavy lifting to Uniskai.

Why Uniskai by Profisea Labs

Uniskai by Profisea Labs is an AI-based multicloud cost optimization platform that helps customers understand and manage their cloud costs. Developed by experienced DevOps and Cloud professionals, Uniskai provides a comprehensive view of a company’s cloud infrastructure through real-time architectural diagrams and AI-driven cost-saving insights.

Now, appflame, with its global spread and massive use of cloud infrastructure, leverages Uniskai to avoid waste, optimize resource utilization, monitor the cloud environment, make more informed managerial decisions, and stay within budget limits, while generally benefitting from the successful implementation of a FinOps culture.