About boAt
boAt is the world's 5th largest wearable brand and India’s No.1 Earwear brand. Company offers its various products for sale on its web portal and mobile app. During the pandemic in 2020-21, the number of buyers for the audio wearables has increased exponentially and the company has built a community of 3 million online consumers.
Executive Summary
boAt, a leading earwear and wearables brand, had recently opted for AWS DynamoDB for a new service. They experienced an unexpected cost surge. Comprinno provided consulting services to the company over a period of 2 weeks, resulting in 65% cost reductions
Challenges
boAt utilized Amazon DynamoDB starting November 2021 for a new service, to fulfill its need for a consistent high performance-oriented database. Low latency for an average of 20K database hits/second, resulting in a flawless smooth user experience, was highly desired. They incurred unexpected high costs for AWS DynamoDB in the months of December-2021 and January-2022. Comprinno was consulted to review the database configurations to achieve Cost Optimization. An initial target of 20% cost reduction was set for Phase 1 of the project.
Analysis
Comprinno extensively used 2 AWS services during its analysis phase:
- AWS Cost Explorer: This service has an easy-to-use interface which aided in visualization and understanding the spending and usage of the AWS DynamoDB. AWS Cost Explorer helped the Comprinno team determine that the Read and Write requests to the database were the major cost contributors.
- AWS CloudWatch: Comprinno team monitored the metrices using AWS CloudWatch. The read/write operations and the traffic pattern were analyzed using the historic data from CloudWatch. Based on this information, Comprinno could now assess the optimal capacity requirement for read-write units.
From the reports generated by AWS Cost Explorer and AWS CloudWatch, it was deduced that the OnDemand mode for DynamoDB was generating high costs for the company. It was deemed fit to shift DynamoDB from On Demand capacity mode to Provisioned Capacity mode based on the analysis done for capacity.
Solution
Comprinno team implemented the below changes as an immediate remediation:
- Configuration changes were done to switch from OnDemand capacity mode for DynamoDB to Provisioned capacity mode. With provisioned capacity mode, the optimal number of data reads and writes per second were specified.
- AWS CloudWatch was again used to monitor DynamoDB to fine tune and arrive upon an accurately provisioned capacity ensuring desired levels of low latency and high throughput.
- DynamoDB auto scaling of throughput capacity for read and write of tables was enabled. This enables a table to increase its provisioned read-write capacity to handle sudden increases in traffic without throttling.
Results
Within 2 weeks (Phase 1) of onboarding Comprinno for providing cost optimization solution, boAt noticed an immediate drop in daily expenses for DynamoDB. Daily costs incurred for DynamoDB have reduced by 65%. Comprinno team ensured through accurate configurations that the high performance level was met even after cost optimization. boAt had a sales event scheduled in the month of March, 2022.The surge in the traffic was handled by the AWS DynamoDB auto scaling without any huge impact on cost.
Copyright 2022