Case Study: Illumina saves nearly $400,000 per month and accelerates genomics analysis with Amazon Web Services (EC2 Spot Instances)

Illumina Saves Nearly $400,000 Monthly, Speeds Genomics Analysis Using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Illumina, maker of sequencing systems and the BaseSpace Sequence Hub genomics‑analysis platform used by over 90,000 researchers, faced rapidly rising cloud costs as data volumes grew—peaks of terabytes per instrument and long-running, compute‑intensive genome analyses pushed AWS spend to about $1 million monthly, with more than $400,000 just for compute. The company needed to cut compute and storage costs while preserving scalability and fast turnaround for customers.

Illumina moved BaseSpace to use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and tiered S3 storage, cutting monthly compute from >$400K to just over $100K and saving an additional ~$90K in storage—nearly $400K total—while gaining more compute capacity. The changes let Illumina lower customer costs (to about $2.50 per sample for large customers), spin up thousands of instances on demand, accelerate analysis times, and support faster global expansion.

Illumina

Andy Nelson

Associate Director, Informatics & Cloud Operations