Britannica Knowledge Systems embraces a cutting-edge FinOps strategy for their AWS infrastructure

Britannica Knowledge Systems is harvesting corps of awards and the sky's the limit!

Fair-hailed Britannica Knowledge Systems (BKS) wins civil aviation, defense, and security leaders’ trust presenting them with the best-in-class comprehensive scheduling, qualification, and learning management solutions including the leading training and readiness management system, Fox. Fox's trailblazing algorithm-based optimization engine helps Britannica Knowledge Systems’ customers capture real-world pains to design valid, beneficial, practical, and polished schedules and plans unlocking various optimization goals such as minimum cost, maximum performance, and more (multi-goals are possible and preferable). Fox allows BKS’ customers to specify peculiar collections of business rules and policies to ensure schedules are validly empowering users to indicate scheduling rule violations, defining preferences at the same time. Moreover, with Fox, users easily outline values and implied costs for training activities and resources, including inducements and fines to maximize the optimization model that unifies Training Management, Training Scheduling, Resource Management, Training Development, and Learning Management feasibilities into one holistic, but yet extremely beneficial environment.

Partnership Goals

Developing holistic training and management system is impossible without continuous technological evolution, transformation, and experimentation involving environments transition to AWS (Amazon web services) cloud, monolith architecture lithotripsy, embracing Docker and Kubernetes, autoscaling practice introduction, adoption of new databases like Elasticsearch and MongoDB, alongside the traditional SQL and many other innovations. All these changes obviously had to come with lots of infrastructure updates, including R&D labs relocation to the cloud and attaching additional performance labs: QA dedicated labs and development labs including experimental ones. And, bearing in mind BKS’ innovative AWS-based training and management platform's rapidly growing popularity among civil aviation, defense, and security brands, which involved swift accounts multiplying, Britannica Knowledge Systems’ decision-makers prioritized infrastructure visualization, automation, and optimal cost-management strategy development. BKS attached their AWS accounts to the Uniskai cloud management platform to:

Designed by mature DevOps experts, Uniskai by Profisea Labs, lets the users visualize, manage, analyze, and optimize their cloud infrastructure. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Uniskai analyzes system utilization and user behavior patterns and provides unique recommendations to curb the cloud bills swelling and stay within the cloud budget. Uniskai already supports major cloud vendor AWS, and support for Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other top CSPs (cloud service providers) is to follow shortly.

Reaching the Goals

Uniskai, powered by artificial intelligence, provides information about system usage and user behavior patterns and arranges unique recommendations that save cloud budget. To help BKS save the cloud costs, the Uniskai platform combined all cloud cost optimization best practices into one unique cost-saving strategy that allowed Britannica Knowledge Systems’ experts to:

  • Get access to a complete, transparent, real-time, and eye-pleasing visual architecture of everything that happens inside their AWS cloud infrastructure to keep up to date with the used resources and all cloud costs including a fully-displayed depiction of their cloud-based production environment presented in three forms: Cloudlist, Cloudmap, and Cloudnet. Here BKS professionals could get all the details about each instance, manage instances right inside the diagrams, control multi-account environments including Autoscaling groups that add more capacity during the day and make expense reports with just one click.

  • Detect unattached/doubled/wrong-sized resources and manage them in the Waste Manager, where they are listed with all the details, including the info on how this volume or wrong-sized instance to find. Plus, wrong-sized instances are also issued to the Waste Manager for Britannica Knowledge Systems’ experts to consider the rightsizing recommendations right away. And the best part is that our dearest partners don’t have to do a sanity check manually; all the cloud waste is automatically gathered by the waste manager and waiting for them to come and clean it in a matter of minutes to save thousands of dollars.

  • Get AI-based usage-tailored EC2 instances rightsizing recommendations with all the necessary information in one dashboard, including name, tags, region, type, and usage details. The experts see the current price and the recommended change that makes it easy to decide and then modify instances matching instance types and sizes to your actual workload's capacity usage at the lowest possible cost right in the dashboard once all the details are considered.

  • Handle cloud costs and save up to 1000$ a month by utilizing a unique AI-powered FinOps strategy of rightsizing, reservations, and many other features, including intelligent multi-service scheduling of Databases, EKS, and Autoscaling groups.

    With Cloudsitter, BKS specialists painlessly maintain and monitor, manage resources and stop/start them directly from the user-friendly control panel enabling multi-account and multi-cloud scheduling. Cloudsitter provides BKS professionals with AI-driven scheduling recommendations based on machine learning algorithms and allows the creation of company-set hibernation policies for maximum automation of the process (including autoscaling ones) with the ability to temporarily suspend any of the resources connected to the policy.

  • Pick up advanced AI-powered recommendations for sophisticated and accurate cloud budget planning and prediction. Based on Machine Learning algorithms, Uniskai offers data-driven analysis of the BKS performance allowing Britannica Knowledge Systems’ experts to inspect past accomplishments by viewing the topology per environment, unlock hidden saving opportunities, plan an optimized cloud budget for the next period (setting a strict budget limit), and take immediate actions to fine-tune the current and next month activities.
  • Ensure maximum teams productivity via effective automation of the production environment processes allowing BKS experts to control specific environments and manage the budget automatically. After allocating specific permissions to each member of the team Britannica Knowledge Systems’ managers easily monitor all the changes made in the system in Logs including automatic alterations.

Uniskai’s Features BKS leveraged

Cloudlist, Cloudnet, Cloudmap, Billing, Waste Manager, Rightsizing, Cloudsitter, Account Manager, Logs

Results

Once Britannica Knowledge Systems’ highly skilled professionals connected their well-developed multi-account AWS-based production environment to Uniskai the following outcomes were immediate.

Uniskai - perfect cloud management platform just for true cloud devotees

Uniskai by Profisea Labs hits the digital market to make a real shake-up in the cloud-based ecosystem, leaving other market players trailing behind, as their first-generation cloud solutions cannot rise to the hot CloudOps challenges, while Uniskai’s unique and patented technology is capable of tackling all scope of CloudOps challenges, presenting the innovative approach, where the visual representation of cloud assets and well-rounded cost optimization automation are working together to enable customers to see all the waste and make saving decisions quickly and safely.

“I feel that it's trying to work for me, rather than me working on the platform”, says Yair Pinyan BKS VP R&D, “The key benefit for me, as a very busy manager who wants just to give tools to his team to perform, is that, with Uniskai, I give a perfect solution to my managers to work properly. Profisea Labs is an organization that develops a culture of a customer-centric company, and you know that when there is a problem, I hear about it after it was solved. And agility of the company to go on and develop solutions that heal all of their customers’ pains is something worth mentioning. Once they understand the real pain, even without me asking for it, they get it done – it’s always a win-win situation. I have a strong feeling that if this company keeps embracing this culture and keeps serving the customers in such a way, the sky's the limit.”