Case Study

Trigent's Application Engineering and Cloud Optimization Slashes StudentBridge's AWS Costs by 30%

Education
Cloud Services

About the Client​

StudentBridge is a global EdTech leader headquartered in Atlanta, GA, known for crafting customized Student Enrollment Solutions to help higher education institutions exceed their enrollment targets. With a track record of assisting over 250 colleges and universities, they create engaging digital experiences for prospective students.

In today’s digital age, where students often make college decisions online, StudentBridge develops innovative tools such as video Viewbooks, interactive campus maps, and immersive virtual events to create a compelling first impression. Their comprehensive, one-stop-shop approach incorporates award-winning video production, mobile communications, campus visit solutions, and data analytics. By merging storytelling with cutting-edge technology, StudentBridge redefines how institutions connect with students.

HQ in Atlanta, GA

years of experience
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partners
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Business Challenge

As a cloud-first company and AWS client, StudentBridge utilizes over 20+ AWS services, including S3, SNS, EC2, EKS, and RDS. As the company scaled organically and through acquisitions, the different tech stacks, diverse application architectures, and multiple Cloud instances resulted in a mash-up that led to inefficiencies, complexity, duplication, and resultant cost escalation. It posed a significant hurdle in maximizing the potential benefits of their AWS services, necessitating a strategic intervention for enhanced efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Compounding the challenge was the absence of a comprehensive architecture diagram, hindering a clear understanding of their cloud infrastructure.

Using AWS’s Well-Architected expertise, Trigent reviewed the systems and applications and identified multiple high-cost elements. Additionally, there were inefficiencies in utilizing Twilio, a messaging infrastructure, leading to higher messaging costs.

Before Trigent’s engagement, StudentBridge operated within a complex technological environment resulting from inorganic growth. On the AWS front, they used hundreds of Kubernetes containers and lacked visibility into their use. The front end utilized Stencil.js 1.9.0 and Ionic 5.3.1, while the back end consisted of 27 microservices running on Ruby on Rails and Python. Trigent initiated an effort to resolve the technical debt, optimize cloud infrastructure costs, and update the outdated components of the system.

Trigent Solution

Keeping pace with the rapid innovations in cloud technology and realizing the potential benefits is challenging for most tech-savvy companies. Trigent leveraged strategic technical solutions to address StudentBridge’s business challenges and align with the project. The key solutions included:

AWS Architecture Analysis:

  • Identification of Costly Services: Trigent initiated the solution by identifying high-cost services, precisely pinpointing EKS and RDS as contributors to the monthly expenditure.
  • Manual Analysis: A comprehensive analysis of logs spanning 90 days, performance metrics, and configuration details was conducted.
  • Kubecost Implementation: Trigent harnessed Cloud Assessment tools from the AWS Marketplace to meticulously analyze the Kubernetes (k8s) usage within the AWS infrastructure. This provided valuable insights into cluster efficiency and consumption patterns.

AWS Application Reliability Engineering and Cloud Optimization:

  • Addressing EKS Challenges: For EKS, the primary focus was resolving auto-scaler crashes. This intervention resulted in a substantial reduction of 45 instances, effectively optimizing the service.
  • Optimizing RDS: By carefully analyzing weekly performance metrics, instance sizes for RDS were adjusted, reducing monthly costs.
  • Twilio Cost Optimization: A meticulous study of Twilio costs, bills, and message metrics was carried out. Trigent eliminated the use of special characters, reduced message length, and used links for longer messages, which resulted in an additional reduction in the monthly Twilio cost.
  • Collaborative Analysis: Trigent's architects and technical experts worked closely with the StudentBridge team to thoroughly examine their AWS environment. This collaborative analysis aimed to identify opportunities for optimizing the infrastructure.
  • RDS Backup Configuration: The team configured the Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) backup mechanism to store only essential data, streamlining data management and storage practices.
  • Holistic Resource Analysis: Beyond EKS and RDS, Trigent extended the analysis to other services, ensuring a thorough examination of ElastiCache and Cloud Watch Logs.

Serverless Architecture Optimization:

  • Microservices Evaluation: Trigent comprehensively evaluated StudentBridge's existing microservices architecture. Based on service usage and requirements, recommendations were made to migrate specific microservices to AWS Lambda for improved efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
  • Technology Retention: While optimizing the back-end infrastructure, the existing technologies, namely Ruby on Rails and Python, were retained to ensure continuity and stability in the system.

Client Benefits

The Trigent-led transformation project brought about a significant positive impact on StudentBridge’s business. These substantial benefits were supported by tangible metrics, underscoring the project’s effectiveness.

  • AWS Cost Reduction: By optimizing AWS infrastructure and implementing cost-efficient practices, Trigent successfully reduced the monthly AWS expenses by a whopping 30%, resulting in an annual saving of over a Quarter Million Dollars.
  • Back-end Scalability: Trigent’s strategic recommendations for the back-end architecture enabled StudentBridge to scale its services in response to increased user activity. Crucially, this scalability was achieved with minimal associated cost increments.
  • The transformation project was executed with remarkable efficiency, culminating within a relatively short time frame of just under 14 weeks.