Optimizing Cloud Expenditure for Pharmaserv

Introduction

The cloud offers opportunities for growth and scalability, but if not managed properly, it can quickly lead to rising costs. Many businesses today face inefficiencies like over-provisioned databases and underutilized resources that unnecessarily increase their cloud expenses.

This gives rise to the need for companies to engage in cloud optimization, in order to avoid hidden costs and ensure they get the most out of their cloud investments.

Overview

Pharmaserv, a leading provider in the pharmaceutical distribution industry, uses cloud services to manage and scale their operations. However, inefficiencies in their cloud architecture led to increased costs, which directly impacted their operational budget.

Facing these challenges, Pharmaserv partnered with CloudPlexo to implement a more efficient solution.

Quote from Pharmaserv:

“Partnering with CloudPlexo was transformative for our operations. Their support not only helped us reduce cloud costs significantly but also improved the efficiency and reliability of our infrastructure. By optimizing our databases, implementing autoscaling, and enhancing our CI/CD pipeline, we’ve streamlined our workflows and unlocked better scalability and performance. The results speak for themselves—we’ve achieved both financial savings and operational excellence. CloudPlexo’s expertise has been invaluable, and we’re now better positioned to scale our business effectively.”

Name: Chinedum Eze Position: Lead DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Challenges

The challenges were increase in cloud costs and underutilized resources. This included over-provisioned databases, inefficient staging and production environments, and different workloads spread across multiple regions.

Solutions by CloudPlexo

CloudPlexo conducted a comprehensive review of Pharmaserv’s cloud account and implemented targeted solutions to optimize their infrastructure:

1. Re-Architecting the Staging Environment:
   • Adjusted resources to align with actual usage.
   • Implemented autoscaling groups and an application load balancer to dynamically manage traffic and reduce costs.
2. Database Optimization:
   • Resized the Amazon RDS instances to better match their workload needs.
   • Reduced unnecessary storage costs by optimizing database configurations.
3. CI/CD Implementation:
   • Introduced a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions to streamline deployments and enhance operational efficiency.
4. Region and Workload Optimization:
   • Identified underutilized resources in less-used regions and consolidated workloads for better utilization.
5. Routing Efficiency:
   • Enhanced Route 53 configurations to streamline DNS management and improve performance.

Results

After the implementation, Pharmaserv achieved:

• A significant reduction in cloud expenditure through optimized resource allocation.
• Improved system reliability and scalability due to the introduction of autoscaling and load balancing.
• Faster and more reliable deployments with the CI/CD pipeline.
• Streamlined operations and reduced manual interventions.

Conclusion

CloudPlexo’s strategic optimizations enabled Pharmaserv to take control of their cloud infrastructure, cut costs and boost efficiency. This case study shows how a focused approach to re-architecting and optimizing cloud systems can lead to big improvements in operations.