Case Study: Student.com achieves 83% EC2 cost savings by migrating Kubernetes workloads with Spot

Student.Com Migrate Kubernetes Workloads To Spotinst, Saving 83% On Their EC2 With Ease

Student.com, the world’s largest marketplace for student accommodation, faced large seasonal traffic spikes that required both container-level and infrastructure-level autoscaling after moving to Kubernetes. To cut cloud spend while preserving availability, the team evaluated Spot (formerly Spotinst) to leverage EC2 Spot Instances, Elastigroup and the Kubernetes integration for automated infrastructure scaling and cost optimization.

Using Spot’s Kubernetes integration, Spot Analyzer and Elastigroup, Student.com migrated Kubernetes worker ASGs to Spot Instances in just a few hours and rolled production over in under four hours. Spot automated the underlying scaling and instance bidding, driving an 83% reduction in EC2 costs; Student.com plans to migrate masters next and expects ~90% of its estate on Spot.

Student.com

Steve Lowe

Chief Technology Officer