Case Study: Financial Engines cuts costs by 90% with AWS Lambda

Financial Engines Cuts Costs 90% Using AWS Lambda and Serverless Computing

Financial Engines, the largest independent investment advisor in the United States, needed to improve the scalability and resilience of its integer programming optimizer as its business grew and traffic spikes became more common. The company also wanted to reduce the burden of managing a large monolithic server environment while supporting millions of clients and complex portfolio calculations. It turned to AWS Lambda and Amazon CloudWatch as part of its serverless computing strategy.

With AWS Lambda, Financial Engines replaced 50 IPO servers running across 21 environments with four Lambda endpoints that scale automatically with demand, run in parallel, and remove the need for server provisioning and maintenance. The results were significant: AWS Lambda helped deliver more than 90% infrastructure cost savings, about $110,000 annually in hard costs, near-zero downtime, and support for 200–300 million requests per month at peak rates of up to 60,000 per minute.

Financial Engines

Paul Gibson

Principal System Architect