Case Study: VSCO achieves 70% EC2 savings with Kubernetes

How a Mobile App Saved 70% on Its EC2 Bill with Cloud Native

VSCO, a mobile photo app company based in Oakland, CA, was running a PHP monolith while adding Node.js and Go microservices after moving from Rackspace to AWS. Although the team containerized services with Docker, each service lived in separate EC2 instance groups, which led to wasted resources and made deployments and operations inefficient.

To address this, VSCO chose Kubernetes as its container scheduling platform, alongside gRPC and Envoy, to consolidate workloads and standardize deployments. With Kubernetes, VSCO cut EC2 costs by about 70%, increased EC2 efficiency by 2x to 20x, reduced deployment time from 1–2 weeks to 2–4 hours, grew deployments from 1,200 to 3,200 per year, and lowered total outage minutes by 88%.

VSCO

Melinda Lu

Engineering Manager for the Machine Learning Team