Case Study

After experiencing some outages in their data centers, TuneIn’s engineering leadership decided to migrate their applications and services to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and stop managing their own physical infrastructure.

As their footprint in the cloud grew, so did TuneIn’s cloud bill – particularly after they built their real-time transcoding service, which converts feeds from radio stations, podcasts, live sporting events, etc. into the right audio format. This application, running at scale on top of Kubernetes, is critical to the business.

After the migration, the cost of cloud operations was higher than prior on-premises hosting costs and was drawing the finance team’s attention. Although they were hoping to save on costs with AWS Reserved Instances (RIs), siloed teams were running their own Amazon EC2 instances / Autoscaling Groups (ASGs), and Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) / Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) stacks with little consistency in instance families and types across workloads. This made it difficult to commit to reserved capacity.

Engineering teams also needed more visibility into costs as they were migrating applications to Kubernetes. Calculating costs took significant time and effort, and with no dedicated FinOps team to track govern, costs were quickly growing.

Flexera offered TuneIn a solution that would give them the savings and reliability with an enterprise-grade SLA and in-depth visibility into the cost of workloads running in Kubernetes clusters: Flexera Ocean.

“We were never willing to use (Amazon EC2) Spot instances,” said Ryan White, Senior Director of Engineering Operations at TuneIn. Running Spot instances is cheaper—up to 90% in some cases—but their usage comes with the fact that AWS can take back the instance at any time if its compute power is needed elsewhere.  With millions of users streaming TuneIn content, using their website and apps, and sending requests for content from hundreds of types of devices like Alexa and Google Home, losing service was not an option.  

The inherent volatility of Spot instances makes them risky, but TuneIn trusted Flexera to run their Kubernetes workloads on Spot instances after a successful trial with Flexera Ocean.  

Flexera also offered another solution to help TuneIn take advantage of additional savings from cloud commitment discounts and manage their complex fleet of RIs: Flexera Cloud Commitment Management. The product’s flexibility allows TuneIn to maximize savings while avoiding long-term commitment lock-in.

Instead of hiring someone to analyze their AWS usage, manage instances, and ensure availability, TuneIn uses Flexera Ocean to safely leverage Spot instances and they use Flexera Cloud Commitment Management to manage Reserved Instances (RIs) for workloads running on Kubernetes.

High availability and savings with Spot

Ocean’s predictive capabilities anticipate Spot interruptions and replace instances without disruption. TuneIn also leverages Ocean’s unique ability to use different types of Spot instances. By using Kubernetes affinity and anti-affinity rules, which can be applied by node, availability zone, and even instance type/size, users can strategically declare rules for instance types to keep infrastructure from going dark when there is an outage or disruption in the spare capacity market.

With Flexera Ocean, TuneIn saved more than 25% on their AWS bill (including storage, networking, etc.) while also effectively eliminating the risk of Spot service disruption by utilizing Spot capacity across a range of instance families and sizes.

Unit cost visibility

The teams managing TuneIn’s APIs and streaming services needed to know how much they were spending per application/service and stream, to understand profit and loss margins. Using Ocean, TuneIn can now see how much they are spending per Kubernetes Namespace, deployment, and even pod, and can easily calculate the unit cost per stream. This granular, workload-level visibility into usage and cost isn’t available on the AWS bill.

“Being able to pull out the cost data from the Ocean UI to determine how much we’re spending by service and by stream has been hugely beneficial to multiple teams,” said White.

Reserved Instances coverage for testing

The savings don’t stop there. Flexera Cloud Commitment Management delivered TuneIn savings of over 40% with RIs. TuneIn needed to temporarily increase capacity to support a testing project. Cloud Commitment Management cost-effectively increased TuneIn’s RIs by more than 340% over eleven days. Then, two weeks later when testing was complete, it reduced their total RIs by an equivalent amount in only three days.

For TuneIn, highly available systems are critical to maintaining quality customer experiences. With Flexera, TuneIn saw immediate benefits in cost savings and cost analysis capabilities – all with high availability for their applications.