Better tech, lower costs

Curt Ecott
Flexion Inc
Published in
2 min readFeb 17, 2021
Creating pennies from heaven: how the cloud can save you money

Thinking of moving to a cloud-based solution, but dreading the cost? Sometimes you actually save money — lots of it.

Flexion has been creating cloud-based solutions since, well, there were cloud-based solutions. We bring the technical and subject-matter expertise to the table to help identify the optimal implementation given the client’s goals and the user’s needs, or as we like to say, “improving scalability and enhancing features while reducing costs at scale.”

SQS = savings

One recent implementation was for a public service client. The project included three distributed processes — super efficient and sequential. But if any process had a problem, everything came to a halt. The team needed to have visibility into any problematic event that might slow down processing for everything.

We came in to help debug the solution. They implemented SQS (simple queuing service) from Amazon. As a nice bonus, they also identified about $26K in savings. This was a huge savings for the client.

What’s SQS? Simple queuing service from Amazon is sort of like being a VIP in a fancy grocery story. As soon as you walk in, you have your own employee ready to check you out. No lines. No waiting. If there’s a problem that might slow things down, another dedicated employee shows up to handle it personally. No more holding everyone else up — and great visibility into any problems so they can easily be fixed.

Optimizing for better bang for the buck

We helped another client save even more money with their cloud implementation. The client has been moving many projects to the cloud, and they have many subsystems and new services. They’ve been mindful of having underused and overused AWS services and have been pushing to remove waste and optimize the solutions to reduce costs. We were able to show them best practices in AWS implementation, develop applications to check for waste, and create a dashboard to aggregate all the client’s accounts for better visibility into expenditures. This work helped the client save more than 40% over four years (almost $5 million). Not bad!

Written by: Curt Ecott and Kyle Lanier

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