Case Study: Zendesk achieves 60% cost savings and 3x data retention with Amazon Web Services

Zendesk - Customer Case Study

Zendesk, the SaaS customer-service platform used by over 94,000 paid accounts, had migrated its ELK logging stack to Amazon EC2 i2 instances with local instance storage. As the company grew, that design made scaling expensive and cumbersome, forced constant instance additions for storage, required custom and error-prone disk-encryption code, and limited log retention to about 30 days when 90 days was needed.

Zendesk redesigned the stack to decouple compute from storage and adopt a tiered Amazon EBS approach—gp2 for hot data, st1 for throughput, and sc1 for cold data—and applied the model to its Splunk SIEM as well. The change made scaling fast and predictable, simplified encryption by using EBS-managed encryption, and increased availability across multiple AZs, while cutting overall logging costs by more than 60% (86% for the Splunk deployment) and delivering a 50% monthly DevOps cost reduction and a tripling of retention.

Zendesk

David Bernstein

Director, Operations Services Management