Reducing Overall Costs by 50% and Improving Performance Using AWS Graviton with Logz.io

Logz.io provides an AI-powered observability platform to thousands of customers worldwide to unify logs, metrics, and traces into a single solution. The solution simplifies troubleshooting, de-risking deployments, and optimizing telemetry costs to empower teams to improve application performance and accelerate innovation while managing costs effectively. Logz.io has been using AWS since it launched in 2014 and ran data ingestion on Amazon EC2.

Like many companies, Logz.io was focused on high growth until the global macroeconomic shift in 2022, when it changed its focus to improving efficiency. Logz.io wanted to alter its infrastructure in two ways: advancing its technical stack while using open-source software, and lowering the costs of its storage-optimized Amazon EC2 instances. The company saw the potential to solve both challenges using AWS Graviton. Logz.io adopted the service, ran a proof of concept, and worked alongside AWS to determine the instance types that would perfectly fit its performance and scale needs.

To compare the performance, Logz.io set up two environments. It created a test cluster alongside its production cluster by using self-managed OpenSearch—a distributed, community-driven, open-source search and analytics suite. The company also procured five AWS Graviton–based Amazon EC2 instance nodes for performance benchmarking. After a few weeks of testing, the results showed that by migrating to AWS Graviton, Logz.io could maintain or enhance performance while potentially reducing costs by 15 percent. To improve performance and efficiency, Logz.io decided to make the switch. “We really benefited from the simplicity, the cost, and the quality of AWS Graviton,” says Asaf Yigal, cofounder and chief technology officer at Logz.io.

As the company migrated its OpenSearch clusters and data-ingestion-pipeline workloads to AWS Graviton, it optimized and diversified its instances. “Using AWS Graviton–based instances, we’re no longer compute bound,” says Amitai Stern, team lead of telemetry storage at Logz.io. “We’ve opened up a world where compute is keeping up with load, which empowers us to maximize the value of our AWS infrastructure.” Logz.io uses Amazon EC2 Im4gn and Is4gen instances, which are storage-optimized instances designed to run applications that require high throughput and low-latency access to large amounts of data. This migration improved Logz.io’s performance, which empowered the company to reduce its infrastructure costs by up to 30 percent—double what the company had expected. “This was a major cost improvement,” says Yigal. “We were able to transfer these savings to our customers during an economic downturn, which was a great outcome.”

Spurred by this major improvement, Logz.io also migrated its Microsoft Azure workloads to AWS Graviton in 6 months. For this second migration, Logz.io used the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), which is a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program. After completing both migrations—first moving its OpenSearch workloads to AWS Graviton and then migrating its Microsoft Azure workloads to AWS—Logz.io achieved significant cumulative cost savings, reducing its total cost of ownership by up to 50 percent.

Logz.io performed both migrations without disruption to its business, which was especially important because it needed to keep its solution available 24/7. The financial operations teams are required to deploy instances in specific Availability Zones to support the latency and availability requirements of each workload. They were able to deploy the required instances without major changes to the architecture. “Working alongside AWS was very comfortable in terms of flexibility,” says Stern.

By consolidating workloads on AWS Graviton–based instances, Logz.io simplified and streamlined deployments, freeing up its development teams to increase automation and make the system more resilient. Its developers are also becoming more aware of the instance types they are running, growing as they learn new capabilities, and having a bigger impact on the company. “By migrating to AWS, we eased the burden of managing servers thanks to the control layer and automations that we have,” says Stern.

Logz.io will continue to optimize its workloads. Using the capabilities of different AWS Graviton–based instances, the company has improved the usage of its compute resources. It plans to reduce its compute and storage costs even further with more optimizations. In other parts of its business, Logz.io is planning to adopt Amazon EC2 R8g instances, which are powered by AWS Graviton4 and deliver excellent price performance in Amazon EC2 for memory-intensive workloads.

“I was impressed by the quality of service from AWS as we were migrating to AWS Graviton–based instances,” says Yigal. “It was amazing to be able to work closely alongside AWS to get the servers and instances we needed to make our business more efficient.”