Reducing compute costs by up to 30% by migrating to AWS Graviton with TCBS

Established in 2008, TCBS is one of Vietnam’s most profitable securities firms. The company empowers over 1 million individual and corporate investors to optimize their asset portfolios through advanced technology and analytics on the company’s one-stop-shop platform, TCInvest. To reduce infrastructure costs and enhance energy efficiency while greatly improving performance, TCBS began modernizing its containerized workloads, building on its years of experience using AWS.

The company evaluated different solutions for deploying and managing hundreds of microservices on Kubernetes. It ultimately selected Amazon EKS due to the service’s operational reliability, its ability to efficiently scale Kubernetes workloads, and the ability to seamlessly integrate it with other AWS services.

At the same time, TCBS began using Karpenter, an open-source solution that simplifies the provisioning of worker nodes by facilitating on-demand scaling without the need to provision resources in advance. That helps TCBS optimize costs while maintaining high scalability during peak traffic periods. Another notable benefit is Karpenter’s drift-detection feature, which automates the replacement of outdated nodes, making cluster upgrades—especially in environments with hundreds of nodes—significantly more manageable.

To further enhance price performance, TCBS used AWS Graviton–based Amazon EC2 instances, which integrated with Amazon EKS clusters that support both x86 and Arm architectures. “AWS Graviton offered a compelling balance of price, performance, and scalability,” says Nguyen Trong Tu, director of IT infrastructure at TCBS. “Our familiarity with using AWS made the transition to AWS Graviton a natural next step in our optimization journey.”

TCBS migrated its containerized workloads to AWS Graviton–based instances on Amazon EKS, extending adoption across both production and non-production environments. That move included internal APIs, public applications, and trading support systems. The adoption process was smooth and the team found that virtually no code changes were required for the majority of its workloads.

The company’s workloads span critical business applications in addition to operational services that are provided by third parties. Most of TCBS’s applications are built in Go and Java, and the team found it straightforward to migrate the applications to AWS Graviton–based instances. AWS Graviton proved to be highly compatible with TCBS’s existing technology stack.

To streamline operations, TCBS built automations to support its multiarchitectural CI/CD pipelines, facilitating seamless deployment across diverse environments. The team is now confidently running full-scale production workloads on AWS Graviton, including both internal systems and public services. The stability and performance of these systems have exceeded the company’s expectations.

TCBS currently runs 47 percent of its compute workloads and 50 percent of its database footprint on AWS Graviton. As a result, it has lowered overall compute costs by up to 30 percent and reduced Amazon EC2 unit costs by 18 percent—all while improving both performance and scalability. By optimizing its compute using AWS Graviton, TCBS is now able to get more value per dollar.

The company’s most critical public applications, which require high availability and scalability, perform as well or better after upgrading them to AWS Graviton instances. The performance and efficiency gains reinforce TCBS’s position as a regional leader in innovation and infrastructure modernization. With the resulting cost-efficiency and performance gains, TCBS is able to reinvest in innovation while maintaining lean and agile operations.

TCBS is among the largest Vietnamese companies that use AWS Graviton at scale across both production and non-production workloads, and it continues to expand and optimize its environment on AWS. “By using AWS, we can confidently scale our business while staying focused on delivering value to our clients,” says Le Minh Duc, IT infrastructure manager at TCBS.

Using AWS services has helped TCBS foster a culture of experimentation by empowering its teams to experiment. Using isolated testing environments, teams can prototype and validate new features within hours without the risk of impacting production. This has fostered a more agile culture within the organization.

The use of cloud services has also encouraged regular performance testing. Because TCBS’s infrastructure can scale to meet testing demands, the company is able to provision large-scale environments for performance testing and decommission them when no longer needed. That approach removes concerns about cost or set-up time. As a result, teams now conduct performance testing more frequently, directly contributing to the resilience and reliability of its systems.

As TCBS validates more workloads for compatibility with the new architecture, the company plans to further improve price performance by increasing its adoption of AWS Graviton to power 90 percent of its total workloads. AWS Graviton has become the default choice for deploying new cloud-native workloads at TCBS, playing a key role in the company’s long-term infrastructure strategy due to its cost efficiency and performance reliability.