Case Study

ZestMoney boosts cloud savings and efficiency during DevOps modernization

ZestMoney logo

At a glance

Industry: FinTech

Location: New Delhi

Employees: 500

Products: Ocean, Flexera’s container optimization solution
 

Featured results

  • Cost savings via spot instances without compromising availability or performance
  • Optimal cluster utilization efficiency with container-driven autoscaling
  • Reduced tedious manual analysis and management of compute infrastructure

The challenge

Poor visibility and manual processes couldn’t control cloud costs

ZestMoney, the largest AI-driven “buy now, pay later” consumer lending platform in India, enables instant financing at checkout for millions of customers who lack access to credit cards or other formal financial options.

Facing increasing AWS costs, the DevOps team often fielded questions about overall cloud spend. In an all-too-familiar storyline, the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic led to greater budget scrutiny and increased cost optimization efforts across the organization. DevOps needed to better understand what the organization was spending and if it was using those resources as efficiently as possible.

However, gaining that visibility and implementing optimization measures was no easy task for a DevOps team that relied on time-consuming manual processes. To further complicate matters, the team was in the process of moving its workloads to Kubernetes.

The solution

Ocean for complete visibility, actionable insights and greater cloud efficiency

Ocean offered a suite of products that delivered extreme cost savings without compromising availability and performance. This provided ZestMoney with full visibility, actionable insights and automation to improve cloud efficiency and maximize ROI.

ZestMoney’s proof of concept (POC) experience quickly proved Ocean’s value. “The technical team’s expert consultation and support gave us confidence,” says Ganesh Narasimhadevara, Director of DevSecOps and Platform Engineering at ZestMoney. “For our POC, we migrated an existing autoscaling group onto Spot. It only took us a few days to be fully confident in Spot’s capabilities.”

The result

Delivering FinTech solutions without breaking the bank

Cost savings with flexibility for ECS and EKS workloads

Despite the potential cost savings—up to 90% in some cases—the up-front risk of unreliability and disruption with spot instances was a significant concern for ZestMoney. The DevOps team began testing Ocean on overnight batch processes that were running risk analysis calculations on 10-50 very large servers, which were costly and required significant compute power.

“I was quite reluctant, worrying if everything would be ok and if we would have any downtime during migration. I was skeptical about it. But once we tried, we started loving it,” Narasimhadevara says.

The company was also struggling to containerize its applications and infrastructure. As this effort progressed, ZestMoney continually migrated environments to Ocean and are now in the process of shifting from ECS to EKS to gain potential portability across public clouds. Because Ocean accommodates both ECS and EKS, ZestMoney has benefited from this flexibility and now relies on Ocean for both workloads. With all production workloads running on spot instances, they have achieved a 60-70% reduction in EC2 spend. Today, only a handful of instances run as on-demand, including production workloads. Flexera (formerly Spot) was able to provide solutions for compute infrastructure to adapt to ZestMoney’s Kubernetes workloads—instead of the other way around.

Efficient compute infrastructure utilization with container-driven autoscaling

Aside from cost savings, ZestMoney has seen significant value in container-driven autoscaling. To address mismatches between pod requirements and the underlying nodes, Ocean proactively assesses container resource requirements and automatically spins up a variety of VM types and sizes to perfectly match the workload needs. It continuously optimizes utilization whenever possible, spinning down any underutilized nodes and bin-packing the remaining pods onto other nodes. For ZestMoney, this has translated into consistent utilization of compute infrastructure and peace of mind that resources are always optimized for efficiency.

“We are almost always at 80% cluster utilization, which is where we want to be. As soon as it hits 85%, Ocean takes care of scaling up,” Narasimhadevara says.

Kubernetes infrastructure cost allocation, automated optimization and 24/7 support freed DevOps from manual infrastructure management.

Ocean addressed the need for highly accurate, container-level cost showback and chargeback with the built-in ability to easily analyze underlying Kubernetes cost of compute and storage by namespace, resource, annotations and label. For ZestMoney’s busy DevOps team, this provided a critical ability to move away from extensive manual analysis of Kubernetes infrastructure spend. Simultaneously, container-driven autoscaling freed the team from tedious infrastructure management.

It has been seamless for us. We don’t spend time worrying about underlying resources since we moved to Ocean. It’s a very big win for us because most of our apps are now stateless and we don’t have to do hands-on infrastructure management.

Ganesh Narasimhadevara, Director of DevSecOps and Platform Engineering ZestMoney

Reduce costs and boost efficiency with cloud visibility

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