How Diaceutics Used CloudZero To Reduce Their AWS Costs By 41%

The Challenge

When a cancer patient needs treatment, efficiency is of the essence. The more quickly they get the right treatment, the more likely they’ll land on the road to recovery. A quick diagnosis and clear path to treatment are crucial to expediting cancer patients’ recovery and minimizing the stress and emotional impact of the disease. For over 19 years, Diaceutics has committed to reducing the time it takes patients to receive the best care for them. Through partnering with laboratories, physicians, pharmacies, and other key stakeholders, Diaceutics enables more patients to receive the right treatments at the right time.

In a medical context, efficiency is a life-or-death matter for patients. In the cloud, efficiency can play a similarly double-edged role: The most cloud efficient companies set themselves up for long-term success, while the least efficient imperil themselves. To provide accurate, prompt care, Diaceutics frequently queries a large volume of data — resulting in a substantial cloud footprint, and a rising need for efficiency.

“It started with Snowflake,” said Brien Mullins, Senior Director of Engineering. “We do a lot of data engineering and analytics, so we invest a lot in Snowflake. It’s what drove us to want better cost control across all our systems.”

Specifically, Diaceutics wanted to understand their cost per query and project within their Snowflake environment, as retrieving and coordinating data from multiple sources lies at the heart of their value proposition. “We were aware of unoptimized parts of the process, but we didn’t have a clear path to optimization,” Brien said.

It wasn’t just Snowflake. Diaceutics also uses AWS, Datadog, and Databricks, and wanted a cloud cost management (CCM) solution that would unify all their spending in a single pane of glass. That way, they could attribute 100% of their IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS costs to the teams responsible for managing it.

“Engineers were managing their costs, but only to a certain extent,” Brien said. 

Lastly, Diaceutics wanted to transform the relationship between engineering and finance. Whenever Diaceutics’s finance team would send inquiries to the engineering teams about past spend, trying to put it in a sensible context, the engineers would spend a lot of time stitching together the data in Microsoft Excel and presenting it in a finance-friendly way — a highly inefficient system.

The Solution

Snowflake recommended CloudZero, the global leader in proactive cloud efficiency.

CloudZero commenced the proof of value (POV) process by ingesting 100% of Diaceutics’s Snowflake, AWS, Datadog, and Databricks spending metadata, and allocating it in their desired framework. Initially, this meant cost per team, a crucial Dimension for driving cost accountability in their engineering function, as well as all their business units.

CloudZero also ingested Snowflake telemetry data, a unique platform capability that would allow Diaceutics to calculate their all-important cost per Snowflake query metric.

Lastly, CloudZero established financial reports that would show Diaceutics’s CapEx spend versus their non-CapEx spend — an important view for their finance team. CloudZero also built other custom views for certain of Diaceutics’s financial leaders, and provided them all with platform logins, making it possible for finance to easily and proactively find the data it used to take retrospective engineering labor to surface.

The Results

Reduced S3 spend by $204,000 (170% of savings target)

In addition to their allocation objectives, Diaceutics knew they had some cloud waste, and hoped CloudZero would help them minimize it. With regard to AWS S3, they had a goal of reducing its monthly costs by $10,000. CloudZero would ultimately reduce their S3 spending by $17,000 per month — 170% of their initial savings target, and $204,000 per year.

How did they do it? “We attacked it a number of ways,” Brien said. “We archived a lot of data, put some data into Glacier, took some data out of Glacier that didn’t belong there, and implemented automation to handle S3 resources in the future.”

Brien estimated that this took one engineer a month of work to complete. Given the median engineering salary of $91,420 per year (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), this means roughly $7,618 invested for $204,000 of impact — an ROI of 26x. In all, Diaceutics has reduced their AWS spending by 41% across the engagement with CloudZero.

“We still have quite a few Insights to go,” Brien said, referring to CloudZero’s nexus for savings opportunities. “CloudZero enables us to have intelligent conversations with our DevOps teams to triage and address all our savings opportunities.”

Developed 50+ user allocation dimensions

CloudZero easily helped Diaceutics allocate 100% of their costs by team, giving Diaceutics a powerful tool for introspection within the engineering function. Listing other of the most useful CloudZero Dimension, Brien highlighted their Cost Per Function Dimension, which shows them the costs associated with different sections of their cloud infrastructure — e.g., data ingestion, data delivery, logging, monitoring, specific applications, etc. This further helps them identify areas of inefficient architecture and socialize efficient building strategies among their engineers.

Now, CloudZero’s allocation gives Diaceutics the power to manage engineering costs that they’ve never had before, enabling them to easily look and see what costs the most, whether that makes sense, and if not, which function/team they can engage to help get the spending under control.

Established a source of budgetary truth

“CloudZero has made our budgeting a lot easier,” Brien said. “We’ve now got more regular meetings with our finance team where we can look at the same data and say, ‘This is what we’re spending, and why.’”

After deploying CloudZero, the platform helped resolve a budgetary mixup, where certain expenditures were initially incorrectly attributed. They dived into CloudZero, pinpointed the “the exact moment where the issue occurred,” Brien said. “CloudZero enabled us to identify and resolve the issue, immediately and easily. It has become a source of budgetary truth.”

“We now have everything at our fingertips to make informed business decisions,” Brien said. “CloudZero is a way to control all our engineering costs, and it helps us create optimizations you never would have realized were there.”