Remine cuts cloud costs by 20%+ migrating to EKS with Spectro Cloud Palette

The challenge

As Remine’s growth accelerated, its lean platform engineering team found itself with an unsustainable workload.

Rodney Cobb, Remine’s Director of Platform Engineering, decided that a migration from EC2 to AWS’s managed K8s offering, EKS, would ease the burden on the platform engineering team and cut cloud costs.

But planning and executing the migration added even more workload to the team, and the process risked dragging on for months.

“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.

As well as looking for efficiency and automation to benefit the platform engineering team, Cobb was also seeking a solution to benefit Remine’s application developers — who were struggling to navigate the complexity of Kubernetes in EC2. “We wanted to be in a better place with our devs, where they understood and could properly leverage Kubernetes”, said Cobb. 

The solution

Spectro Cloud Palette was the solution that Cobb was looking for. 

Palette offered Remine a complete solution to manage its Kubernetes clusters, with automation to enable faster customer onboarding. “Spectro Cloud puts us in a position where, even with a team of three people, we can still scale up,” said Cobb. “We can now build our product quicker than ever, and with the ability to make everything repeatable, testable and scalable from the beginning”. 

Remine now uses Palette’s full-stack declarative management and robust lifecycle automation capabilities for its EC2 and EKS clusters. It starts with using Palette’s Cluster Profiles to model, deploy — and upgrade — clusters tailored to the infrastructure needs of each new customer it onboards. “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”.

Palette also eased the migration from EC2 to EKS by allowing Cobb’s team to model their Kubernetes stack and quickly build up and scale resources in EKS. “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.”

Remine has saved its platform engineering team time, but also slashed its cloud costs. “We are now looking at a 20% overall reduction in our AWS investment”, confirmed Cobb, “and we estimate that to reach 30% by the time we complete the migration.” Remine is free to focus on its business growth, without the burden of escalating cloud expenses.

Application developers across Remine are benefiting too from faster, simpler access to the Kubernetes resources they need every day. “In every scenario in which we engage with our dev teams, Spectro Cloud makes it easier for us to support them”, said Cobb, “It gives them the empowerment to self-serve and removes the ‘black box’ experience”. 

While the features of the Palette product are important, it’s the service and support from the Spectro Cloud team that have made the biggest difference. “One of the most important aspects of the relationship we have with Spectro is to work with an attentive and helpful team of experts that partner with us to solve every challenge”, said Cobb. “We start a conversation and it leads to a solution, which is amazing. When we compare Spectro Cloud to our other vendors — there’s no competition.”

Results and benefits

Customer onboarding from months to weeks

With Palette, Remine unlocked faster deployments, accelerating customer onboarding from months to weeks. With Cluster Profiles, Remine can now easily create a custom blueprint for each client and spin up clusters with the click of a button. Remine’s new level of agility means satisfied customers and a clear path to continued scale. 

5x faster migration and 30% in cost savings

Palette helped speed Remine’s EC2 to EKS migration timeframe by 5x, allowing it to model its Kubernetes stack and quickly build up and scale resources in EKS. Being able to fully migrate in under a month not only unlocks better operational efficiency, but also accelerates 30% in cloud cost savings.  

Upgrading and patching with zero downtime

With Remine’s previous DIY, manual approach, clusters would have to be taken offline to perform any needed upgrades and configuration changes. Palette unlocked the ability to apply changes, upgrades and patches from a single point of control, without any downtime.