AWS in Switzerland and Austria (Alps)

How Lastminute.com achieved operational excellence and cost efficiency on AWS

Today, we’re excited to dive deep into a shared success story with an established brand in the travel and hospitality industry, lastminute.com. As one of Europe’s first online travel agencies, lastminute.com serves millions of travelers across 17 countries through digital experiences on various platforms. For them, being digital isn’t just part of what they do – it’s who they are.

However, as their business grew, legacy systems and self-managed infrastructure began to create limitations. They needed flexibility, scalability, and a future-proof foundation to continue innovating. That’s when lastminute.com began their cloud transformation journey with AWS.

In this post, we’ll explain how this European leader in travel technology adopted five different strategies to optimize their cost in the cloud: Migration, Stateless Compute, ARM-Based Instances, reserving database capacity and moving to open-source solutions. We’ll examine their journey from operating a traditional on-premises data center to fully adopting AWS cloud services. This transformation includes their migration process, platform modernization, and how they ultimately achieved operational excellence and cost efficiency in the cloud.

Migration

lastminute.com started their migration to the AWS cloud in 2022. By August 2024, they had completed their migration from 12 on-premises databases to 198 Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances.

The migration enabled the adoption of a micro-database architecture, with each microservice using its own Amazon RDS cluster. This ensured logical data isolation, preventing one microservice from impacting others. For the migration, they were able to leverage the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) agreement that granted them financial support during this phase.

“Migrating to AWS it transformed the way we innovate. With improved scalability, operational resilience, and access to cutting-edge cloud technologies, we can now move faster, experiment more, and deliver better experiences to our customers.”
Massimo Vailati, lastminute.com

Compute optimization

Throughout the migration, lastminute.com worked closely with the AWS Enterprise Support Team to uncover cost savings opportunities across their entire architecture.
For their Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters, they identified stateless microservices that did not require long-running executions and moved them from on-demand to Amazon EC2 Spot Instance, leveraging Karpenter as an orchestrator to maximize savings and efficiency. In 2023, lastminute.com achieved $695,000 in cost savings, which increased to $1.04 million in 2024—representing a 50% year-over-year improvement.
Their current 55% Amazon EC2 Spot Instance coverage delivers an optimal balance of cost efficiency and application reliability. Complementing this, lastminute.com purchased Savings Plans that yielded an additional $300,000 in savings for 2023, growing to $403,000 in 2024. This demonstrates the power of committing consistent compute usage for predictable workloads.

“Optimizing compute costs was a top priority for us. By leveraging Spot Instances and Savings Plans strategically, we struck the perfect balance between cost efficiency and application reliability, unlocking over $1.4 million in annual savings.” 
Massimo Vailati, lastminute.com

Embracing the Future with Graviton

AWS Graviton processors have been a game-changer for cost-aware companies. At lastminute.com Graviton-based instances delivered $56,000 in savings in 2023, doubling to $142,000 in 2024.
Today, 57% of lastminute.com’s compute instances are Graviton. Additionally, they have started to adopt Graviton-based instances for database operations, resulting in savings of $3,800 in 2023, growing to $16,900 in 2024 as the AWS footprint increased. At the end of 2024, lastminute.com had achieved 72% Graviton usage for their database workloads.

Adopting Open Source Solutions

In October 2024, AWS announced support for Valkey on Amazon ElastiCache. For lastminute.com, this represented another opportunity to maximize value.
ElastiCache for Valkey offers Serverless and node-based clusters priced respectively 33% and 20% lower than other supported engines. Additionally, Valkey 8.0’s memory optimizations reduce memory overhead by up to 20.6%, allowing the storage of more data without increasing the memory footprint.
In February 2025, lastminute.com started the migration of its Amazon ElastiCache for Redis clusters to Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey, and by June 2025 they had already achieved savings of $10’000 in cache services alone.

Database Optimization: Reserved Instances and Migration

The company’s database strategy went beyond just Graviton adoption. By leveraging Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances for their relational database needs, lastminute.com saved $134,000 in 2023 and $210,000 in 2024 – (a 57% year-over-year increase.)
Additionally, they made a strategic decision to refactor some of their services, migrating them to Amazon DynamoDB. DynamoDB is an AWS NoSQL database that offers high scalability and availability in a cost-effective way.

Embracing a Cloud Optimization Culture

Building on their successful cost optimization achievements, lastminute.com continues to strengthen their cloud economics culture. The team participated in a Cost Optimization Immersion Day, that started with a session on cost optimization fundamentals. Teams explored common cost control challenges and gained a deep understanding of AWS core pillars of cost optimization. This session provided insights into how cost strategies evolve as organizations progress through different stages of their cloud journey. Following the immersion day, lastminute.com participated in a Cost Optimization GameDay where teams applied their newly acquired knowledge in simulated real-world scenarios. This practical experience helped teams build confidence in implementing these optimization strategies across their production environments. Participants faced challenges that required them to make quick, informed decisions about resource allocation while maintaining application performance and reliability.
These initiatives have further reinforced lastminute.com’s commitment to cloud economics and established a culture of cost awareness across their technical teams. The knowledge gained during these sessions positions them well for identifying and implementing future optimization opportunities as their cloud footprint continues to grow.

Conclusions

This success story highlights the transformative impact of fully embracing the cloud. Rather than treating the cloud as a simple lift-and-shift of infrastructure, lastminute.com adopted a mindset of continuous innovation and optimization, fully leveraging the elasticity, flexibility, and evolving capabilities of AWS.
For guidance on optimizing your AWS costs and maximizing value, connect with your AWS account team.