How BrightQuery cut AWS costs by 20% in just two weeks with OneLens

About BrightQuery

BrightQuery is a leading global data intelligence platform. BrightQuery provides the most reliable and accurate insights on over 200 million companies, 1 billion employees, and 300 million directors & officers across the world.  

From empowering hedge funds, private equity firms, and institutional investors with critical investment data to enabling marketers to accelerate their sales efforts, business leaders across industries trust BrightQuery for their data solutions.  

Context

BrightQuery operates entirely on AWS, with the majority of their resources managed under a single AWS account, along with an additional account. BrightQuery’s primary cloud spend goes to EC2, Redshift, S3, RDS, and VPC services.

Due to their multi-region setup, data transfer costs have been a significant contributor to their overall cloud expenses. As BrightQuery scaled, managing these costs while ensuring efficient use of their cloud resources became a critical challenge.  

Challenges

We had been trying to optimize our cloud costs for some time, but the process was cumbersome and lacked direction, said the COO of BrightQuery, Hari Pulijal.

Despite their efforts, BrightQuery found it difficult to develop a clear strategy for cost optimization. Without a structured approach, planning and executing any significant cost-saving initiatives became a hassle.  

Additionally, with a small team and limited experience across various AWS services, they faced challenges in making informed decisions to optimize their increasing cloud costs.  

Solution

Within the first two weeks of using OneLens, BrightQuery discovered several ongoing cost-saving opportunities through an in-depth analysis of their AWS infrastructure:

• Redshift: OneLens analyzed Redshift usage and suggested efficiency improvements like implementing encodings, leading to immediate and ongoing savings.
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• S3 Buckets: OneLens identified S3 buckets with high storage costs and low access patterns, recommending lifecycle policies to optimize storage. It also highlighted buckets with older data versions, uncovering further opportunities to reduce costs with continuous monitoring.
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• Multipart Upload Failures: OneLens detected failed multipart uploads in certain S3 buckets, allowing BrightQuery to implement lifecycle policies that prevent unnecessary costs from accumulating over time.

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