It was a typical Tuesday morning when I stumbled upon an article in TechCrunch. The headline was intriguing: "Lucidity Keeps Cloud Block Storage Neat, Tidy, and Cost-Efficient." As a cloud optimization advisor, anything that promises efficiency in the cloud landscape immediately captures my attention. But what truly caught my eye was the mention of their recent $5.3 million funding round. For an India-based company to secure such a substantial investment was not just a testament to its solid financials but also an endorsement of its groundbreaking technology. I skimmed through the article, and the more I read, the more I was convinced that I had to see this solution in action. Without a second thought, I went on their website and requested a demo. The demo did not disappoint: Lucidity's platform was intuitive, and their approach to NoOps for cloud storage was revolutionary.
However, as with any promising solution, I had my reservations. Was Lucidity living up to its claims in a real-world scenario?
I decided to dig deeper and connect with a customer to get a firsthand account of their experience.
1. Identifying the Pain Points: The First Call
When I first spoke with the customer, they were candid about their cloud storage challenges. They were grappling with escalating costs running their 200+ VMs: they not only had little visibility on how efficient they were with EBS block storage management and EC2 disk utilization but were frustrated by the constant manual adjustments required for storage scaling.
These are quite common paint points for cloud enterprise customers: surveys indicate that only about 10% of cloud enterprise users have complete visibility into their disk utilization across their entire infrastructure. The benchmark for disk utilization is measured on average at 28.5% only, in other words, 3 times more storage is provisioned than required! When you compound this metric with the average 13% of the overall cloud spend that is purely EBS, Block Storage, that means that about 10% of enterprise cloud bill is wasted on overprovisionned EC2 block Storage!
The customer was quick to run the maths and evaluate the potential savings from optimized EC2 EBS management.
2. The Deep Dive: Audit Phase
Given those concerns, the customer agreed to have Lucidity conduct an audit of their existing cloud storage setup, a service Lucidity provides at no cost. The audit's findings were eye-opening: $200k was spent monthly on Disk, for a Disk Utilization of only 25%. They not only pinpointed areas of significant overprovisioning, they also measured the DevOps effort only for disks -Monitoring, Alerts, ‘expanding’ disks- to about 50-80 days FTE, and about 200 hours of server downtime a year, affecting critical business applications.
3. The Transformation: Proof of Concept (POC)
Armed with the insights from the audit, the customer decided to embark on a POC with Lucidity's NoOps solution. Lucidity solution not only optimizes storage size but also allows for EBS auto-scaling with zero downtime. The results were almost instantaneous:
The customer experienced a threefold increase in disk utilization, reaching 75%.
Additionally, the DevOps effort was reduced to just 5-10 days, down from the initial 50-80 days required for disk management.
They realized cost savings of $100k on their monthly cloud bill, and, impressively, there were no application code changes required.
4. The Verdict: Customer Feedback
After the POC, I reconvened with the customer to gather their feedback. They were elated. By using Lucidity's solution, they were saving up to 10% of their total cloud bill. Achieved with zero downtime and significant speed enhancements, the customer emphasized Lucidity's seamless setup and operational ease as standout benefits. The solution freed their team to focus on innovation and designing new solutions rather than managing disks.
Conclusion
Optimizing compute resources and block storage is a direct route to cloud cost savings, especially when considering that EBS storage contributes to about 20% of the overall cloud bill. Lucidity stands out by offering a solution that not only enhances the performance and cost-efficiency of EBS storage by about 50%, but also streamlines storage right-sizing and auto-scaling. Notably, Lucidity's robust solution extends to Microsoft Azure disk storage, broadening its applicability across diverse cloud environments. This automation liberates DevOps teams, allowing them to redirect their efforts towards innovating new features and products.
Take Action
If you're looking to harness the full potential of cloud optimization, don't navigate the journey alone. Reach out to both Lucidity and OptimNow for expert guidance. Together, we can help you achieve unparalleled efficiency and cost savings in your cloud operations.