Improving Compute Efficiency by up to 40% Using AWS Graviton–Based Instances with Typeform

Typeform provides no-code tools for brands to build interactive forms, surveys, and other digital experiences, and its tools connect to hundreds of other enterprise services. The company drives more than 500 million digital interactions each year.

Typeform aims to continuously innovate and deliver new features for its customers to improve their forms and experiences, so it always works to optimize its workflows and remove friction points. “Our team is constantly trying to find new ways of achieving more while spending less,” says Matias Ozdy, head of infrastructure at Typeform.

Previously, Typeform was using non-Graviton-based instances, but it wanted to increase the cost efficiency of its infrastructure while preserving performance. The company runs its compute workloads using Amazon EC2 and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which can run fault-tolerant workloads for up to 90 percent off. It also benefits from Savings Plans, which businesses can use to save up to 72 percent with a flexible pricing model.

After conducting thorough tests, Typeform discovered that AWS Graviton–based Amazon EC2 instances would perfectly fit its use cases and spin up faster. “That was a major win because we could scale our clusters seamlessly on demand and spend less overall,” says Ozdy.

To prepare for the migration to Graviton, Typeform began rebuilding its architecture and continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. The company also created a custom internal dashboard tool so that its teams can view the migration status. “The dashboard was very important because it increases motivation when you can visualize progress,” says Ozdy.

In 6 months, Typeform moved from using non-Graviton-based instances to running 90 percent of its workloads on Graviton. This includes the majority of its clusters on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)—a service for starting, running, and scaling Kubernetes without thinking about cluster management—which power the company’s core application. Typeform has also increased Graviton coverage on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), easy-to-manage relational databases optimized for total cost of ownership, from 35 to 78 percent.

“Using the migration tool was quite easy,” says Ozdy. “It took less than 1 day to migrate each of our databases. Then, it took 2 weeks for two engineers to rebuild all our Terraform modules to prepare them for Graviton.” Throughout its migration to Graviton, Typeform received support from the AWS team. The benefits of the new Graviton-based infrastructure exceeded the company’s expectations. “The major factor that we noticed was how much less we were spending with exactly the same traffic using Graviton,” says Ozdy.

By improving efficiency on Graviton, Typeform has achieved 19 percent cost savings. The company is running the same workloads in some containers as before but with up to 40 percent less CPU usage. In addition, the infrastructure dedicated to the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline can now support 10 percent more development processes using the same number of instances. “Performance and cost are the two main benefits of using Graviton,” says Ozdy. “And we’re also happy with the stability. The instances are quite stable, and we haven’t had to debug issues that we didn’t understand.” Typeform has seen a decrease in issues and support requests since migrating to Graviton.

The efficiency gains also translated into productivity gains for Typeform. The company has sped up build times for internal tooling by two to three times, accelerating the development of new features. Now, teams can work together more smoothly under tight deadlines because they spend less time on individual tasks and the resource availability has increased.

The combination of cost savings and efficiency has created new opportunities to reinvest in innovation. Thus, Typeform can focus more on improving the experience for the businesses that use its tools and their end customers. Moreover, the company is improving sustainability because Graviton-based instances use up to 60 percent less energy than comparable Amazon EC2 instances for the same performance.

By using Graviton, Typeform has an infrastructure that improves efficiency, promotes sustainability, and provides opportunities to invest in ongoing innovation and growth, all while maintaining performance.

 

With the majority of its compute workloads running on Graviton, Typeform is optimizing more aspects of its infrastructure. The company plans to build out its artificial intelligence (AI) workloads using Amazon Bedrock, an easy way to build and scale generative AI applications with foundation models. “Based on our journey migrating to Graviton, our recommendation is that a company that wants to start building a product and is using AWS should go directly with Graviton,” says Ozdy.