CASE STUDIES
See how CloudWerx is helping its customers architect, optimize and secure their cloud environments.
GCP Training for DWaaS Company: Databricks
In just a few months CloudWerx was able to support the planning of GCP growth through fully customized AWS to GCP migration training.
The Subject
Databricks is a software platform that helps its customers unify their analytics across the business, data science, and data engineering. They provide a Unified Analytics Platform for data science teams to collaborate with data engineering and lines of business to build data products.
The Challenge
Databricks is a fast growing private company, striving towards becoming public with a strong hybrid cloud approach. CloudWerx was tasked with designing and implementing a new GCP environment for the client, evaluating current AWS infrastructure, migrating/qualifying AWS applications to GCP environments, and providing client-focused designated courses for the client’s DevOps team.
CloudWerx Solution
CloudWerx provided four 1-hour training sessions around these four topics: Logging, Asset Identification, VPC, and IAM. With read-only access, CloudWerx accessed the architecture identified in the sessions, including Asset Identification, VPC and IAM. This allowed CloudWerx to understand Databricks' current environment and allowed us to focus the sessions on the company's specific needs.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT...
Through a thorough Environment Discovery Assessment across the Subject's Company (IT, Security and Product) teams, CloudWerx was able to support the planning of further GCP growth through fully customized AWS to GCP migration training.
Cloudwerx delivered GCP training curricula as well as internally-developed single-topic “deep dive” technical presentations. The customer gained a more thorough understanding of those topics, which guided them to refactor several elements of their environment to align with best practices. Further, the customer was empowered to better implement the highlighted technologies in other projects.
KEY RESULTS
100% of the attendees gave the feedback that they would attend another training session lead by CloudWerx
The most valuable parts were:
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"The comparisons to other cloud vendors, since we have a hybrid cloud approach."
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"The hands on demonstrations and configuration examples"
100% of the attendees reported the level of effort in the course was either very good or excellent
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL
“CloudWerx has become a trusted partner for me and my team to help us drive key projects and identify solutions that will be the best fit for our business. Their guidance and expertise on GCP, in particular,r has been great in opening up the possibilities for how we can leverage it and their training has helped our team ramp to understand what is possible.”
Mike Hamilton, VP of IT, DataBricks
ITaaS to Support Hyperscale and Growth Needs: Databricks
Unable to hire quickly enough to keep up with their growing business, Databricks hired Cloudwerx to find cost effective resources in short notice - giving them an elastic team to support their growth.
The Subject
Databricks is a software platform that helps its customers unify their analytics across the business, data science, and data engineering. They provide a Unified Analytics Platform for data science teams to collaborate with data engineering and lines of business to build data products.
The Challenge
Databricks is one of the leading DWaaS companies in Silicon Valley and is growing at a rapid clip. They just received over 1.5 billion in additional funding and their valuation went from 28 billion to 38 billion in the last 10 months alone. DataBricks is growing so fast they are not able to keep up with the IT demands. CloudWerx was tasked with providing ITaaS to the team at DataBricks to help them scale with confidence.
CloudWerx Solution
Our goal was to bring DataBricks an elastic team of resources to grow with them as the company scales. CloudWerx is supplying a team of resources in the Bay Area and India, giving DataBricks the opportunity to significantly drive down the aggregate cost to outsource these requirements. Then, as Data Bricks grows, our team can dynamically grow with them in all different aspects of their IT business.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT...
CloudWerx was able to get Support, Ticketing, Automation, Documentation and On-Boarding under control until Databricks can source and hire the right resources full time.
Databricks will continue to outsource some of these roles to CloudWerx as it is not their core competency and they do not feel the need. Plus we are able to run some of these projects at a lower cost than they could hire for.
PRIMARY AREAS OF SUPPORT
24x7 Support
TIcketing
Automation
Training/OnBoarding
Documentation
FedRamp/Compliance
Okta Multi-Tenant Improvements
VDI Infrastructure
Fresh Service Workflow Automation
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL
“CloudWerx was the easy button for me and our team. They were extremely responsive and resourceful in getting me the talent I needed while building an elastic bench for me to rely on. CloudWerx helps us stay in front of our scaling issues while giving us a cost-effective way to run and predict our business.”
Mike Hamilton, VP of IT, DataBricks
COST OPTIMIZATION FOR CYBER SECURITY COMPANY
In just 2 weeks, CloudWerx was able to identify over $10M in Annual Savings
The Subject
The subject is an intelligence-led security company. Working as a seamless, scalable extension of customer security operations, the subject offers a single platform that blends innovative security technologies, nationstate grade threat intelligence, and consulting.
The Challenge
In April of 2021, the subject partnered with CloudWerx to identify cost savings opportunities in their AWS Environment. On a quarterly earnings call, the CEO pointed to “out of control cloud spend” as one of the top reasons they were not profitable. So, with the support of the C-Suite, the CloudWerx team of Cost Optimization experts set to work analyzing their top AWS accounts to identify savings and automation opportunities as well as a remediation strategy.
CloudWerx Solution
The Cost Optimization Asset uncovered both “low-hanging fruit” as well as creative and strategic opportunities to drive down cost while maintaining performance -- all with minimal disruption. In addition to identifying the savings opportunities, CloudWerx also delivered a comprehensive Remediation Strategy to work with individual teams within the subject company to achieve said savings.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT...
CloudWerx identified $9,154,872.24 in annual savings within 2 weeks of access to environment.
Wrote scripts to automate
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Unattached EBS volumes, aging EBS Snapshots, unassociated IPs, aging RDS Snapshots, underutilized RDS instances, underutilized DynamoDB table, and idle Load Balancers.
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Proposed scripts in Q3 Aging S3 buckets, AMI deletion, Underutilized ElasticSearch domains, Underutilized ElastiCache, VPC, and S3-API
KEY RESULTS
Identified $10M in Annual Savings Within 2 weeks of Access to Environment
Wrote scripts to Automate Savings
10X Return On Investment
23% Increase in Operational Efficiency
The work performed also increased visibility in relation to spend which drove accountability and awareness of cost throughout the engineering organization. This cultural shift, in addition to the specific remediation work and automation will help the subject company keep their cloud spend under control as they continue to grow and evolve as a company.
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL
"CloudWerx without a doubt made a significant impact on our business by helping us to identify areas where we could drastically reduce our cloud spend while improving performance. We also were able to utilize the engagement to build out some specific automation and tooling which has reduced labor cost and increased efficiencies across our teams."
Hybrid EDA Transformation: NovuMind
CloudWerx was engaged to design and implement a GCP PoC with performance and configuration in mind to balance performance, efficiency, security and cost.
The Subject
NovuMind helps companies leverage the power of AI in their products and services. Their NovuTensor chip is an industry breakthrough – designed to enhance business functions by “making things think.” They offer a wide range of deep learning tools to help apply NovuTensor in a multitude of operations, allowing businesses to optimize for AI computation.
The Challenge
Novumind had no prior GCP experience and was working under extreme time constraints (July- August) to complete the PoC before their EDA tools license expiration. They are ramping up, requiring them to expand their environment very quickly but working with a globally dispersed team and only a single Systems Engineer for their entire infrastructure.
CloudWerx Solution
CloudWerx delivered a custom solution to create, deploy, and [eventually] destroy a 'CloudPC' experience for the globally-dispersed engineers. This solution increased security, lowered infrastructure costs, and improved the user onboarding experience. Within the CloudPC, Cloudwerx created a mechanism to allow users to install software packages without compromising security or system stability.
DELIVERABLES
Cloudwerx created a Custom ‘Cloud PC’ Experience for NovuMind Engineers and Administrators.
Features of Engineer Experience:
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Each engineer is assigned a Cloud PC with persistent storage
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Through this, they can access NovuMind assets, IP and Synopsys tooling
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Access is available via Nomachine client or web browser
Features of Admin Experience:
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Easily able to create new Cloud PCs
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Ability to use commands to update all Cloud PCs at once
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Simple scripts to destroy old Cloud PCs to free up resources and archive data
KEY RESULTS
System deployment time decreased from months to ~30 minutes while significantly improving user experience and enhancing information security for the client.
CloudWerx provided a detailed Optimization Report, giving NovuMind a snapshot of their baseline, and then a “Project Recap,” highlighting how CloudWerx improved performance, reduced staff workload, optimized the environment, secured the environment, and other notable impacts.
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL
"The entire project and experience from a business and technical perspective has been very smooth, professional and successful... [CloudWerx] took a really tight timeline, put together a great plan, and went to work efficiently executing to deliver in a narrow window."
Jeff Lien, Director of Engineering, NovuMind