Customer Stories / Advertising & Marketing / United States

2023
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Simon Data Increases Staff Productivity Using Amazon OpenSearch Service

Learn how Simon Data, a marketing analytics company, saved time and money using Amazon OpenSearch Service.

88% reduction

in data storage costs

99.9% reduction

in data storage needs

Increased performance

significantly

Reduced

self-managed node clusters from 53 to 12

40 hours saved

on quarterly maintenance

Overview

When spending hours on maintenance eats into time and budget, it’s clear that businesses need to make a change. The DevOps team at Simon Data, a marketing technology company, found that its self-managed Elasticsearch cluster needed a lot of attention. The extra maintenance work reduced Simon Data’s overall efficiency, and the company knew that it was time to invest in a new solution.

Simon Data offers clients a marketing solution that they can use to build advanced customer segments and launch cross-channel campaigns. The company built its success on Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, as the company grew, its small DevOps team was spending too much time and money manually managing the OpsWorks EC2 Stack that supported its Elasticsearch cluster. Migrating to Amazon’s managed OpenSearch Service freed the DevOps team to focus on more important tasks and significantly reduced storage, maintenance, and labor expenses.

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Opportunity | Using Amazon OpenSearch Service to Scale and Automate Maintenance for Simon Data

Founded in 2013, Simon Data is an AWS-native customer data platform that empowers marketers to harness their customer data and improve campaign performance through fast and precise segmentation and personalization. Using the platform, marketers can build hyper-targeted segments using customer and behavioral data, and seamlessly send these audiences downstream to various marketing channels including social media, email, push notifications, SMS, and direct mail. The company’s clients currently run between 900 and 1,300 active campaigns at any given time, ingesting hundreds of gigabytes daily—an amount of data that demands flexible scaling.

Simon Data uses Elasticsearch to log data from these client campaigns. However, it needed a new solution to reduce the maintenance burden required to keep its cluster in top form. Simon Data’s small engineering team of three didn’t have time to constantly monitor for and replace failed nodes in the cluster or to perform up to 40 hours of maintenance every few months.

Because the company is built on AWS, the Simon Data DevOps team identified Amazon OpenSearch Service as the primary option to simplify their infrastructure and save operational time. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully managed solution: when nodes fail, it automatically detects and replaces them—there’s no need to alert the team. And it offers more features that the team needed. “The built-in blue–green deployment feature for Amazon OpenSearch Service is awesome,” says Marshall Zobel, a senior DevOps engineer at Simon Data. “If a configuration change cannot be applied, OpenSearch automatically stands up an entire set of new infrastructure and handles traffic migration behind the scenes.”

A successful proof-of-concept trial phase confirmed that Amazon OpenSearch Service was the best solution to Simon Data’s biggest problems.

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It’s gone from one of those technologies that are foremost in our brains to one of the least problematic, most stable parts of our infrastructure.”

Marshall Zobel
Senior DevOps Engineer, Simon Data

Solution | Reducing Simon Data’s Data Storage Costs by 88% Using Amazon OpenSearch Service

With support from the AWS team, Simon Data configured Amazon OpenSearch Service across three AWS Availability Zones. Beginning in late February 2023, the team tested, optimized, and deployed Amazon OpenSearch Service without affecting the customer experience. “It was a pretty smooth process,” says Zobel. “After the project got going, we got the resources that we needed, and the whole process from the proof of concept to the end of the project took about 2 months.” Though the team expected to encounter speed bumps during the transition, it found that Amazon OpenSearch Service immediately performed better than its previous setup.

“It’s gone from one of those technologies that are foremost in our brains to one of the least problematic, most stable parts of our infrastructure,” says Zobel.

Migrating to the fully managed Amazon OpenSearch Service has empowered the Simon Data DevOps team to be more productive than ever. It also gave the team access to OpenSearch Dashboards, a data visualization tool that makes interacting with data clusters easier and faster.

The team has saved more than time. The process of migrating to Amazon OpenSearch Service included restructuring the company’s data model. Previously, Simon Data stored all client campaign data in its Elasticsearch cluster. Now, it stores data only as long as the sync engine runs, reducing its data storage needs by 99.9 percent.

Reconfiguring its data model reduced the number of nodes Simon Data needed to maintain in its cluster from 53 to 12. This optimization cut spending by 88 percent, which saves the company $200,000 annually. “The savings are probably more, considering that with our previous cluster setup, we would’ve had to increase the number of nodes eventually,” says Zobel.

Outcome | Migrating to Amazon OpenSearch Service Improves Simon Data’s Performance

Simon Data’s decision to migrate to Amazon OpenSearch Service changed the DevOps team’s primary focus from maintenance to growth. As a result, the team is more productive. Its new level of efficiency also helped the company achieve its best possible price performance. The smooth transition empowered the team to access these and more benefits quickly and easily.

Simon Data plans to off-load more time-consuming and problematic tasks onto the managed service, beginning with migrating more clusters to Amazon OpenSearch Service. “We’ve seen the benefits,” says Zobel. “We love the product. We want to gain more of the peace of mind we get with Amazon OpenSearch Service.”

About Simon Data

Simon Data, founded in 2014, is a marketing analytics company headquartered in New York. It offers marketers a customer data system designed to improve campaign performance through segmentation and personalization.

AWS Services Used

Amazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon OpenSearch Service makes it easy for you to perform interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, website search, and more.

Learn more »

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Learn more »

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