Case Study: ReachForce achieves 50% reduction in AWS compute and storage footprint by containerizing 200+ instances with Portworx

ReachForce Containerizes 200+ AWS Instances with Portworx to Reduce Data Center Footprint and CPU Utilization

ReachForce, a marketing automation company from Austin, TX, needed to modernize a 215‑instance AWS data center where EBS storage was only ~25% utilized and EC2 instances were heavily over‑provisioned, while ensuring its stateful services (MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, Jenkins, etc.) remained performant, available and protected. To address these challenges ReachForce turned to Portworx and containerized its stack using Docker and AWS ECS, with Portworx Enterprise providing cloud‑native storage and data management.

Portworx aggregated EBS across container hosts, used thin provisioning and offered easy volume management (Lighthouse UI), enabling ReachForce to serve the same data with roughly half as much AWS storage and to cut its AWS compute footprint dramatically (projecting a collapse from ~215 EC2 instances toward as few as 15 and reporting a 50% reduction in compute). Portworx also simplified container placement by handling container-to-volume connectivity, improving manageability and reliability for ReachForce’s stateful services.

ReachForce

Tom Watson

DevOps Engineer