How Infor saved $2 million with effective CFM strategies

As many organizations are looking to achieve financial success through effective Cloud Financial Management (CFM) strategies, Infor, the global leading software provider, has been experimenting with different practices, from cost reporting to optimization. In this blog post, we will share their success and learning that helped achieve over $2 million in savings through automation and modernization initiatives.

Overview

Infor provides enterprise software products as a service. It builds industry suites in the cloud and deploys technology that improves user experience, leverages data science, and can be easily integrated into existing systems. However, it was very challenging for Infor to manage 10K+ Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) Instances and its associated resources running across the fleets, as well as handle the infrastructure operational costs.

Opportunity: establishing cost monitoring

As part of organization-wide initiative, Infor aimed to identify cost optimization opportunities for stable workloads running on AWS.

By analyzing Amazon Cost and Usage reports (CUR) across member accounts within an organization, Infor identified significant expenditures occurred across several AWS services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), EC2, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). Infor didn’t have a centralized dashboard to monitor and control major costs across AWS accounts. Team had implemented custom AWS Lambda automation to clean up unused resources like Amazon Elastic Load Balancer(ELBs), EBS volumes, Elastic IPs, and EC2 instances, but there was no granular oversight to ensure these schedulers are operated as intended.

To address these challenges, the infrastructure team at Infor focused on establishing a centralized dashboard with Amazon QuickSight and CUR, providing visibility to all member accounts under AWS Organization to monitor and control costs. The team also planned to improve current automation to ensure it operates as expected.

Further, the Infor team worked closely with AWS Technical Account Managers to analyze current workloads and identify cost optimization opportunities. The review uncovered unused resources that could be removed, including EBS volumes, snapshots, S3 storage, and ELBs. More savings were identified by right-sizing EC2 instances and migrating to latest generation instance types.

“We created automated solutions to implement cost-saving recommendations, resulting in significant cost savings. The cost analysis enabled by AWS Cost and Usage Reports and insights provided by AWS Technical Account Managers (TAMs) on interpreting these reports, were valuable in identifying and prioritizing cost-saving opportunities”.

Santhosh Simhachalam
Director, Cloud Services Infor

Solution: automation and modernization for cost optimization

Infor leveraged insights gained from the centralized dashboard to continually refine its AWS architecture and govern costs. The Infor Infrastructure team built custom automation with AWS Lambda, State Manager associations in AWS System Manager, Amazon EventBridge, and Amazon Simple Notification Service(SNS) to automatically detect and address cost optimization opportunities and eliminate those that are not in use.

The team set several rules for when to terminate certain resources.

• Amazon Machine Images older than 6 months were automatically deleted to reduce storage costs.
• EBS volumes without activity for 3 days were removed to minimize resource waste.
• Elastic Load Balancers without healthy backend instances were terminated after 30 days of inactivity.
• EC2 instances inactive for over 4 weeks were automatically snapshotted before termination, with the option to exclude instances marked with specific resource tags.

Overall, Infor’s automation efforts enabled ongoing adoption of using various AWS services, while maintaining control of their cost.

Infor also addressed several cost optimization opportunities.

• The Amazon EBS volumes were migrated from Amazon General Purpose SSD (gp2) to General Purpose SSD (gp3) storage, reducing costs by over $1 Million a year.
• With AWS Compute Optimizer, Infor was able to right-size its EC2 instances and migrated their EC2s to the 6th generation instance types from existing 4th and 5th generation instances. By optimizing and right-sizing EC2s, Infor achieved $80,000 in monthly cost savings across both production and non-production workloads.
• Amazon S3 Storage Lens was another feature that Infor used to gain visibility into their storage usage patterns across large Amazon S3 buckets. The insights enabled identification and removal of 10 TB of storage from unused buckets. It also assisted in identifying buckets lacking adequate lifecycle rules. Lifecycle policies were implemented to automatically remove expired objects including snapshots, logs, and other outdated data. Analysis identified that a significant portion of data was stored in the standard storage tier. To optimize storage costs, objects were migrated to Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which automatically transitions data to the most cost-effective access tier as access patterns change. Through these optimization efforts, Infor achieved $15,000 in monthly cost savings related to Amazon S3 storage.
• Lastly, Infor team conducted a review of AWS CloudTrail logging usage to identify logs with higher than expected costs. Team also reviewed and adjusted log retention policies to align with business requirements while removing unused data to optimize costs. These changes resulted in $17,000 in monthly savings for Infor.

Overall, the infrastructure team took advantage of AWS’ scalable serverless and automation capabilities to proactively optimize resources and reduce costs.

Outcome & next steps

The cost optimization effort has yielded over $2.3 million in cost savings. By implementing automation and applying AWS best practices, the team optimized cloud infrastructure and prevented cost overruns. As of next step, the team is collaborating with other Infor teams to share these learning and automation scripts to help optimize costs across the organization.