Embracing growth without overhead
Every growing business reaches a point where its technology needs to catch up to its ambitions. For Remine, an AI-powered real estate platform that delivers data intelligence for agents, lenders, and multiple listing services (MLSs), that moment came as its user base expanded, leaving its engineering team stretched thin.
To meet the demands of growth — while also staying agile, cost efficient, and most importantly innovative — Remine made a bold mode: migrate its cloud native applications from Amazon EC2 to EKS.
Why EKS?
In the words of Rodney Cobb, Principal DevOps Engineer at Remine: “We leverage many AWS services, from Cloudfront and S3 to Lambda, so we wanted to stay in the AWS ecosystem. In previous roles with other companies I had experience migrating to EKS in production environments. I was confident that we would see a reduction of K8s workers nodes, cost reduction in our EC2 consumption, and need fewer resources to maintain our K8s infrastructure.”
EKS is the keystone for scaling Kubernetes, and it promised several key advantages for Remine’s use case:
- Always On: EKS offers built-in redundancy and high availability. Because of this, EKS helped ensure that Remine’s services stayed online, no matter what.
- Less Maintenance: EKS handles the heavy lifting of managing the Kubernetes control plane, so Remine’s team could stop worrying about updates and configurations and start focusing on delivering value.
- Cost Optimization: EKS helped Remine avoid overspending by using resources efficiently and scaling as needed.
- Managing Growth: As their user case grew, EKS made it easy to scale resources up and down without breaking a sweat.
The challenge: how do you find the time for a migration?
But even using a solution like EKS, managing the full scope of multiple Kubernetes clusters can still be tricky, let alone handling the migration to get there.
Remine was experiencing rapid growth in its user base, and as demand grew, Cobb’s team was being faced with pressure to keep up. Managing infrastructure became a constant drain on time and resources and left little room for innovation.
Cobb recognized the potential of bringing EKS into the picture to provide the scalability and flexibility he was looking for, but he was faced with a daunting task of planning and executing the migration — which was looking like it could drag on for months.
Spectro Cloud Palette has entered the chat
To ease the transition, Remine was introduced to Spectro Cloud’s Palette.
“We were looking for a solution to help us take advantage of all the different tooling that comes with EKS and help optimize our AWS investment,” said Cobb. “Before Palette, we didn’t have the bandwidth nor a clear workflow to get to EKS,” said Cobb. “Spectro Cloud not only unblocked the migration road for us, but it did so by offering us a timeline five times faster than we anticipated.”
Importantly, Spectro Cloud’s Palette platform is a mature, commercial product with strong documentation, polished interface, and outstanding security. It ticked all the boxes for an enterprise-grade solution. As Cobb says:
“It’s tempting to look at ‘free’ open source tools and build something yourself in-house. But OSS tools get abandoned, engineers leave, and you’re left struggling to maintain what you’ve built, support it, and to onboard new talent. I was tired of being a Texas Ranger — I was looking for a partner to ride with us on this journey.”
Palette helped automate much of the complexity that comes with Kubernetes, turning what could have been a month-long migration into a more streamlined and predictable process.
By automating cluster management and other repetitive tasks, Palette gave Cobb’s team breathing room to focus on what really mattered to them: building better systems and delivering value to their users. The platform also made it easier for Remine’s developers to adopt Kubernetes while reducing the learning curve and promoting collaboration.
The payoff: outcomes that matter
With the migration complete and both Palette and EKS working in production, Remine has seen strong and measurable results.
- Lower costs: Remine slashed its cloud costs by more than 20%.
- Greater team efficiency: With less time spent on maintenance and overhead, the engineering team could dive into more rewarding work, like improving the existing product and releasing new offerings
- Developer productivity: The company’s app builders gained confidence in Kubernetes, allowing them to contribute more effectively to the platform’s evolution.
Infrastructure availability and agility have seen a boost, too. “In the past it took us several hours to upgrade our clusters, just waiting for everything to come back online,” said Cobb, “and now with Palette we’re talking zero downtime”.
Follow in Remine’s footsteps
Remine’s journey is a great example of how modern tools like EKS and Spectro Cloud’s Palette can help companies balance growth and efficiency. By embracing automation and simplifying a tool like Kubernetes, they didn’t just cut costs — they set the stage for long-term success.
Looking to get started with optimizing, securing, and scaling your Amazon EKS? Sign up for Spectro Cloud’s EKS Quickstart today! With no customer commitment required, receive a 30-day Spectro Cloud Palette trial along with access to a technical support resource as you learn best practices around managing your Kubernetes clusters.