Eclicktech Achieves 30% Cost Savings through Cloud Financial Management Solution on AWS

Eclicktech started conducting business on the cloud as early as 2010. , It powers its advertising bidding business on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and combines ClickHouse, the open source column-oriented database management system, with services from AWS to achieve high available online analytical processing (OLAP).

With its global business expansion, it is facing increasing cloud usage and cost management. Eclicktech needs to improve its financial processes to establish a cloud-based business environment with transparent, controllable, and optimized costs. Implementing effective Cloud Financial Management (CFM) solutions is critical to achieve this goal. This is an important goal for the operation and maintenance R&D team of Eclicktech, who are responsible for preparing and managing the cloud usage, as well as cost control. “Industry survey reports show that some companies waste up to 32 percent of their cloud spending. As the operation and maintenance research and design team, we need to meet the business's requirements for cloud usage. But we also need to avoid unnecessary capital expenditures,” says Dong Jin, director of operation and maintenance R&D of Eclicktech. “To achieve this goal, we need to explore a new management model that could provide the necessary visibility.”

Cloud Financial Management (CFM) includes a series of tools, skill sets, as well as best practices, functionalities, and guidelines related to execution processes for the purpose of sharing cloud expenditure management and optimization aspects. Eclicktech hopes to obtain validated tools from the beginning and follow industry recommended steps.

“In our opinion, if we can correctly apply CFM best practices within the enterprise, we can have better cloud cost visibility and control capabilities,” says Dong Jin. He adds, “The AWS Well-Architected tool proposes six pillars for improved architecture, with cost optimization pillars focused on avoiding unnecessary costs. Using this framework, we can understand long-term expenditures and control fund allocation, and select appropriate types and quantities of resources, and scale to meet business needs without excessive expenses. This is also one of the important reasons why we have decided to use AWS Cloud Financial Management.”

At the end of 2022, with the assistance of AWS team, Eclicktech completed the problem analysis of the four main modules-measurement and evaluation, cost optimization, planning and forecasting, and cloud financial operation. Then it began to try the proof of concept (PoC) deployment of the Cloud Financial Management solution dashboard through the Amazon CloudFormation template. After the launch of the CFM dashboard, the operation and maintenance R&D team of Eclicktech also conducted continuous research and iteration on the basis of the CFM dashboard. Besides, it continuously enriched indicators and content according to the needs of the enterprise's own business, and expanded it to support Multi-Cloud Financial Management. At present, Eclicktech's solution based on AWS Cloud Financial Management (CFM) has helped itself comprehensively monitor and optimize Amazon EC2 services for advertising bidding, as well as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudFront and other services for storing and distributing advertising content. Then it provided optimization suggestions for Amazon SageMaker service instances used in content creation.

After applying AWS's Cloud Financial Management solution, Eclicktech has achieved the goal of precise cost control and continuous optimization of expenses. With the help of the Cloud Financial Management dashboard, the operation and maintenance R&D team can flexibly choose AWS pricing models and resource services based on different business needs.

As for its business operations, Eclicktech can continuously evaluate and make timely adjustments through optimization suggestions based on the Cloud Financial Management dashboard. In addition to making adjustments, it can continuously improve the accuracy of its cloud budget estimation.

Compared to other financial operation methods, AWS's Cloud Financial Management solution helps Eclicktech establish a cost responsibility culture within the enterprise. Besides, it enables enterprises to invest human resources into core businesses that surpass traditional operational transactions such as enhancing business application quality and exploring innovation through a series of automated tools. “We have tried many automation methods in AWS's CFM, such as Amazon CloudWatch, which not only provides observability of business application performance, but also allows us to configure a series of events to achieve email based expense reporting and automatic resource optimization, "said Dong Jin, “These automated methods not only reduce costs, but also save a lot of human resources, giving us more energy to focus on the quality and development of our business.”

In addition, the rich experience accumulated by Eclicktech in the application of AWS Cloud Financial Management solutions has also opened up new business opportunities for enterprises. The operation and maintenance R&D team continuously enriches the indicators in the CFM dashboard based on business scenarios. While Eclicktech is realizing its own vision of cost optimization through CFM, it also wants to bring its experience to the benefit of a wider range of customers in the industry. To this end, the operation and maintenance R&D team began planning to convert the CFM dashboard service into a commercial service. “We plan to launch a commercial Cloud Financial Management product based on AWS's CFM concept and our already formed dashboard,”Dong Jin said,“This service can be released with the use of AWS Marketplace. Then it can allow more cloud users to gain value from CFM and expand new business lines to create a broad customer ecosystem beyond internet marketing and advertising.”

Going forward, Eclicktech will continue to explore personalized ad material creation with generative AI powered by AWS., and provide customers with a wider range of product choices and experiences. Besides, it will help them improve conversion rates and business monetization.

As an international intelligent marketing service provider for enterprises, Eclicktech offers marketing promotion services to global customers, helping them efficiently acquire users, enhance brand awareness, and achieve monetization.