AWS Professional Services reduces total expenditures with Stoodi cloud by 25%

Created in 2013, Stoodi is an education startup, born in the AWS Cloud, that comprises the Cogna group (the biggest education company in Brazil) and aims to help high-school students access higher education. The startup’s preparatory resources for higher education admission exams and also for the Government National High School Exam (ENEM), which is the main parameter used to enter in some universities, have been used by over 8 million students since its foundation. The Stoodi operation was born within AWS Cloud but its accelerated growth during the pandemic demanded a more efficient cloud operation, ensuring stability, availability and security. To achieve this, Stoodi leveraged AWS Professional Services, which reduced their annual AWS costs by 25% in year allowing Stoodi to invest in improvements to the stability and security of their products.

Since 2013, Stoodi has based its platform and entire operation on AWS Cloud. During this time, Cogna group’s startup has helped approximately 8 million students to prepare for ENEM and college admission exams. The demand for Stoodi services grew substantially during the pandemic with 2 million students accessing Stoodi in 2021 alone.

The head of Stoodi, Ricardo Sudário, reminds us that the platform reached a service volume that was six times higher than its historical average of active students. “To deliver quality education for students across Brazil, especially those who needed it most, we should have an extremely accessible service,” he says, emphasizing that, at the time, Stoodi decided to offer access to its content at no charge for students who could not pay.

To maintain access quality, platform stability and data security, Stoodi’s IT department decided to enhance their cloud environment management, enabling them to reduce costs without affecting quality. “Based on our accelerated growth challenge, we understood there was a need for a team specialized in AWS to help our financial management and optimization, and to ensure the platform was adequately secure. With the recent attacks on other companies announced in the media, it is even more crucial for us to continue following the implemented and tested best security practices,” he explains.

To guarantee the goals were met rapidly and assertively, an assessment performed by Sudário’s team established that the AWS Professional Services team would be the best choice. “The fact that Cogna and other companies of the group had already worked with the AWS Professional Services team, with good results, also weighed in our decision,” he explains.

The solution proposed by the Professional Services team was to assemble a CCoE (Cloud Center of Excellence) focused on improving security stance of the environment, cost optimization, and financial management. “What caught my attention the most during this process was the speed with which we were able to get things up and running. It took us about a month between defining the scope and having a team working on the first tasks,” remembers Sudário. Value deliveries were seen by the company in only a few weeks, thanks to the ongoing improvement process.

The executive reminds us that one of the projects’ postulates was that there be no sudden changes in the experience of students and the team. “We wanted a more productive way to transition and were careful when analyzing our current status and what we wanted to achieve,” he states. To achieve this goal, basic process were followed and enhanced through market best practices, training, and the evolution of some processes.

“Using the main team we built (CCoE – Cloud Center of Excellence), we designed and implemented a significantly more efficient operation, alongside the AWS Professional Services team. This shift was seamless because we also managed to keep the teams engaged throughout the project. They saw value/purpose in everything we built,” he remembers, mentioning the teams’ participation in the financial planning and engineering. People in those areas were incorporated into the CCoE, together with the AWS Professional Services, implementing improvements in the operation using AWS services, such as: Amazon QuickSight; Amazon Athena; AWS IAM Identity Center; AWS Secrets Manager; AWS CloudTrail; AWS Config; AWS Organizations; AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS); Amazon Inspector; Amazon GuardDuty; AWS WAF; AWS Backup, AWS Budgets; AWS Cost Explorer; AWS Cost Anomaly Detection; and AWS Cost & Usage Report, among others.

One of the cloud operation evolutions promoted by the CCoE was the construction of operational dashboards based on the architecture mentioned below and focused on the environment’s financial management, which entailed visibility, transparency and more control over cloud expenses. “The dashboards, warnings, and processes defined by the team help me quickly identify an unexpected expense, or when the planned budget is close to being met,” emphasizes Sudário.

According to Sudário, one of the project’s results was bringing monitoring dashboards and actionable indicators for all parties involved. “This meant bringing the financial planning team in to understand their difficulties, which opened a new horizon of work maturity,” he states.

Among the benefits onset by the Professional Services team’s actions, he highlights the improvement in the security stance in relation to protection and detecting threats and vulnerabilities, not to mention the implementation of tools that help manage these safety findings automatically, bringing more efficiency and productivity to the team.

Aside from greater control, visibility and transparency in financial management, the CCoE also performed several meaningful financial enhancements, such as a 73% reduction in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) service costs, as shown in the image below; a 28% reduction in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) service costs; a 15% reduction in Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) service costs; and a 22% reduction in Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB) service costs.

“These and other reductions resulted in a 25% saving in total AWS costs, which were partially reinvested in adopting new services and solutions to improve security,” he emphasizes.

Regarding Stoodi customers, the platform’s security improvements allows greater stability for the services offered, and improvements in financial management allowed for more investments to optimize company products. “We also saw an improvement in the team’s productivity, now more focused on the evolution of our product, which ends up directly impacting our clients and our business,” celebrates Sudário.

In addition to continuously developing the operation and its architecture through the CCoE (Cloud Center of Excellence) that was established, Stoodi plans to evolve its data storage and processing to further improve its decision-making on products and services. “We are periodically reevaluating savings and cost reduction opportunities without prejudice to the quality we deliver. The work is endless, but the process today is much better rounded. We will continue. On the other hand, there are areas we would like to boost, such as expanding the use of AI to other components of our platform, which demands a more robust data environment,” he predicts.