Multi-Cloud Cost Optimization & Infrastructure Scalability

At a Glance

 52% average cost reduction | $45,216 annual savings | 54% Azure reduction | 51% AWS reduction

A leading cybersecurity platform provider transformed multi-cloud infrastructure costs from $7,045/month to $3,277/month, achieving $3,768 monthly savings while improving scalability and reliability.

The Challenge

An identity-first cybersecurity platform serving enterprise customers faced escalating multi-cloud costs threatening profitability. Azure bills reached $6,320/month and AWS costs hit $725/month, totaling over $7,000/month for infrastructure.

The platform's architecture spread workloads across multiple regions and availability zones without strategic justification, creating unnecessary data transfer and redundancy costs. Storage configurations used premium disk types regardless of performance requirements, and unused resources accumulated from development and testing activities.

Premium storage over-provisioning used Azure premium SSD disks regardless of workload IOPS requirements. Most workloads needed standard SSDs, wasting 50-70% of storage budget on unnecessary premium performance. AWS EFS configured with provisioned throughput and regional replication when workloads required neither high performance nor cross-region redundancy.

The engineering team was focused on security platform development and customer deployments, not infrastructure optimization. They needed cloud infrastructure specialists who could systematically reduce costs across Azure and AWS while improving reliability—all without disrupting production.

The Solution: Strategic Multi-Cloud Optimization

DevKraft deployed a comprehensive optimization strategy combining architectural consolidation, resource cleanup, and storage reconfiguration across Azure and AWS to achieve sustainable cost efficiency.

The 2-cloud parallel optimization approach tackled Azure and AWS simultaneously. The Azure track (May-July 2024) focused on cost analysis, resource inventory, unused VM cleanup, disk type optimization, storage tiering, network optimization, and monitoring setup. The AWS track (June-August 2024) concentrated on regional consolidation, availability zone optimization, EFS reconfiguration, resource cleanup, and VPC optimization.

Azure optimization delivered 54% cost reduction through multiple strategies. Unused resource cleanup identified and deleted development/testing VMs, orphaned disks, unattached public IPs, and idle load balancers. Storage disk type optimization migrated workloads from premium SSDs to standard SSDs where performance requirements didn't justify premium pricing, achieving 50-70% storage savings. VM right-sizing analyzed Azure Monitor metrics to identify over-provisioned VMs and resized to appropriate SKUs. Network cost optimization optimized virtual network topology, removed unnecessary VNet peerings, and consolidated public IP addresses.

AWS optimization achieved 51% cost reduction through strategic changes. Regional and AZ consolidation moved from multi-region to single region strategy, consolidating workloads to single AWS region and availability zone where cross-AZ redundancy wasn't required, eliminating data transfer costs between AZs. EFS configuration optimization reconfigured from provisioned throughput to bursting mode and removed unnecessary regional replication. Unused resource cleanup systematically removed unused EC2 instances, unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, and idle elastic IPs. VPC and networking optimization consolidated NAT gateways, optimized VPC endpoint usage, and reduced cross-AZ and inter-region data transfer.

Implementation Timeline

The optimization engagement ran from May-August 2024 with phased implementation across both clouds.

Azure transformation: May 2024 baseline: $6,320. June 2024 optimized: $2,907. July 2024 validated: $2,941. Average monthly savings: $3,396 (54% reduction).

AWS transformation: June 2024 baseline: $725. July 2024 optimized: $363. August 2024 validated: $343. Average monthly savings: $372 (51% reduction).

Transformative Business Impact

Total monthly cost dropped from $7,045 to $3,277, representing $3,768 average monthly savings and $45,216 annually. Combined cost reduction of 52% across clouds achieved without performance degradation or service disruption.

Azure delivered $40,752 annual savings through 54% cost reduction. AWS delivered $4,464 annual savings through 51% cost reduction. Zero production impact maintained platform availability throughout optimization with no customer-facing disruptions.

Strategic benefits extended beyond cost savings. Simplified architecture with fewer failure points reduced operational complexity. Improved reliability through consolidated infrastructure with focused monitoring. Enhanced scalability with right-sized resources enabling efficient capacity expansion. Better unit economics with lower infrastructure costs per customer improving margins. Operational efficiency through streamlined infrastructure reducing management overhead.

Key Innovation: Multi-Cloud Optimization

The platform's competitive advantage came from combining strategic architectural consolidation with tactical resource cleanup. Storage tiering delivered massive savings -analyzing actual IOPS and throughput requirements revealed 70% of workloads didn't need premium SSDs, saving 50-70% on storage costs with zero performance degradation.

Questioning multi-region assumptions proved crucial. The platform didn't require cross-region redundancy, so consolidation eliminated data transfer costs and complexity without reliability impact. Systematic cleanup across both clouds (VMs, disks, IPs, load balancers) generated 30-40% of total savings.