Case Study: National Instruments achieves 85–90% cost savings and accelerated development with Amazon Web Services

National Instruments - Customer Case Study

National Instruments (NI), maker of the LabVIEW development environment and FPGA tools, faced growing compute demands as FPGA designs became larger and more complex. Their on-premises infrastructure struggled to keep up with resource‑intensive, time-consuming compile and test workloads, limiting development speed and requiring costly hardware expansion.

NI moved its compile and test workloads to AWS—using EC2 Spot Instances, Auto Scaling, and other services (S3, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFormation)—to run large, parallel builds on demand. The change cut compute costs by 85–90%, avoided about $1M in infrastructure spend, enabled 30,000+ server‑hours/month of testing, reduced a 900‑compile job from three weeks to under 10 hours at under $50 per run, and significantly sped product development while letting customers use compile services without buying expensive hardware.

National Instruments

Joe Gardner

Principal Cloud Architect