Case Study: VSCO achieves 70% EC2 savings with Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects

How a mobile app saved 70% on its EC2 bill with cloud native

VSCO, a mobile photography application, faced efficiency and scalability challenges after moving its infrastructure to AWS. Their transition from a PHP monolith to containerized Node.js and Go microservices resulted in resource waste, as each service ran on its own dedicated group of EC2 instances. This setup lacked consolidation and demanded significant manual operational effort, prompting a search for a more efficient orchestration solution from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The solution implemented by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation was the adoption of Kubernetes for container orchestration, supplemented by gRPC and Envoy. This cloud native stack automated deployments and consolidated workloads, leading to a dramatic 70% savings on EC2 costs and an 88% reduction in outage minutes. The shift also vastly improved development velocity, slashing the time for a service's first deployment from two days to just two hours and increasing annual deployments from 1,200 to 3,200.

VSCO

Melinda Lu

Engineering Manager for the Machine Learning Team