Zendesk Achieves 30% Performance Improvement and Reduced Carbon Emissions by Migrating to AWS Graviton Instances

Zendesk, founded in 2007, is headquartered in California and helps business customers in 160 countries and territories worldwide manage customer interactions. The company offers software-as-a-service products that provide businesses with a centralized system to track, prioritize, and resolve customer queries quickly. Zendesk initially managed its own on-premises data centers but started migrating to AWS in 2017.

For the core application of its services, the company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which provide secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Zendesk was looking for ways to optimize compute costs for its core application and its use of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)—a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. This includes around 2,500 Amazon RDS clusters, each with multiple instances. Zendesk also wanted to improve the performance and scalability of its solutions and prepare its business for future innovation, all while working to reduce its carbon footprint. To build toward these goals, the company began to explore different Amazon EC2 instance types.

In March 2022, the company decided to upgrade its array of over 1,200 global clusters in Amazon Aurora—which offers high performance and availability at a global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility—from Aurora 1.17.7 to Aurora 2.10.2, which can run on AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances. “Migrating to AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances was motivated by the desire to prepare infrastructure for the future of innovation and take advantage of emerging technologies,” says Nan Guo, senior vice president of engineering at Zendesk. “By adopting that, we better position ourselves to use advanced Arm-based computing and stay at the forefront of innovation.” Zendesk completed the Aurora upgrade and migration of its core applications to AWS Graviton instances in May 2023.

Zendesk is reducing its carbon footprint by using the energy-efficient AWS Graviton-based instances. Due to better performance achieved by workloads running on AWS Graviton-based instances, Zendesk also downsized the Aurora database instances because they can maintain the same application performance using fewer resources. “Sustainability is very important for Zendesk. Using AWS Graviton-based instances, we have reduced our upstream cloud-related emissions greatly and accelerated our progress toward our carbon neutrality goal,” says Shengyuan Su, sustainability director at Zendesk. 

Zendesk is also optimizing infrastructure costs and achieving better cost efficiency by using AWS Graviton-based instances. Upon completing this migration, Zendesk also downsized the Amazon EC2 instances it was using in production. This resulted in cost savings of around 42 percent for the company. “We saved money in 2022, and that money was saved and compounded in 2023, and those savings keep paying off for us,” says David Boothroy, senior director of foundation engineering at Zendesk. “It’s a big win on both the cost and scalability fronts.”

After Zendesk rightsized its instances, its applications also performed better. For the company’s core application, this performance improvement was 30 percent. The application now gives customers faster response times, which translates to a better customer experience.

The cost savings Zendesk achieved by migrating to AWS Graviton-based instances have been used to support innovation for the company. With the money it saved on infrastructure, Zendesk is investing in research and development as well as exploring new technologies to drive innovation.

“We are very interested in the innovation coming from AWS and want to connect that to our product development and infrastructure,” says Guo. “We have a lot more confidence using AWS, and we want to adopt the latest technology as soon as it becomes available. This has been a great journey.”