20 Minutes: Turning cloud savings into news innovations

July 2024

French news publisher reassigns two full-time engineers to new projects with DoiT cloud cost optimization

2: Full-time engineers free to develop new projects
9.2%: Savings with Flexsave for Compute
$100s: Saved with Anomaly Detection

“Like most media companies, we need to be careful about our expenditure, and with spiking traffic on a busy news day, our costs can quickly rise. The DoiT console helps us see all our costs in detail, understand where they're coming from, and take steps to control them.”
Jérémy Benoist
VP Engineering at 20 Minutes

The Challenge

20 Minutes migrated from on-premise infrastructure to serverless architecture on AWS and Google Cloud to handle traffic spikes during major news events. However, the unpredictable costs of serverless architecture made budgeting difficult, especially with spiking traffic from mobile app usage.

The Solution

20 Minutes implemented DoiT Console for real-time cloud cost visualization across AWS and Google Cloud, Real-Time Anomaly Detection for cost spike alerts, and Flexsave for Compute for automatic discount allocation. The team gained daily visibility into Lambda usage, S3 storage costs, and workload expenses.

Results

Reclaimed capacity equivalent to two full-time engineers for innovation projects
Achieved 9.2% savings on AWS compute workloads with Flexsave for Compute
Saved hundreds of dollars by quickly detecting and fixing Step Functions cost spike
Reduced Step Functions costs by 90% through rapid anomaly detection and remediation

Meet 20 Minutes

20 Minutes is a free news publisher which also publishes a daily newspaper. Launched in Paris in 2002, it was originally aimed at French commuters, and has grown to become one of France's leading news organizations, read by more than 20 million monthly users. With a focus on digital platforms, including its website and mobile app, 20 Minutes delivers up-to-the-minute news updates, insightful analysis, and engaging multimedia content.

Visualizing and managing cloud expenditure with DoiT technology

With DoiT console, the 20 Minutes team can now see exactly what cloud resources it is using and their cost in real time, both for its serverless infrastructure on AWS and for its data analytics workloads running on Google Cloud. The team checks costs daily, with the CTO reviewing expenditure each morning to understand spending and make adjustments. The console allows them to optimize caching policies by seeing the immediate impact of changes on costs, and use forecasting to predict costs and scenario-plan for news-driven traffic spikes.

Spotting spiking costs quickly with Real-Time Anomaly Detection

20 Minutes uses Real-Time Anomaly Detection to spot unexpected spikes in cloud costs, reducing false positives and enabling rapid remediation. When a bug in Step Functions configuration led to spiking costs, the team immediately received an alert and fixed the issue quickly. They spotted costs rising from $2 to $20 per day and reduced them by 90%, saving hundreds of dollars. The company also uses Flexsave for Compute to automatically allocate discounted rates to AWS compute workloads.

Freeing up developers to develop new services

20 Minutes saves significant time with DoiT technology. Without full visibility of cloud usage, the company previously spent weeks diagnosing and fixing cost issues. With DoiT console, they can identify problems quickly and save development time. These time savings allow the team to dedicate resources to valuable projects, including developing a new generative AI tool to help journalists reformat news stories, allowing journalists to focus on creating original content.

Access to cloud expertise on demand

20 Minutes maintains regular contact with the DoiT team through direct messaging and monthly check-ins. When they need support, the team turns to DoiT Cloud Solve and Cloud Reliability Engineers who react quickly with precise analysis and solutions. The CREs help fix issues in a matter of days, providing essential cloud expertise on demand.

See how DoiT helps cloud teams control spend

Explore how DoiT Cloud Intelligence helps teams improve visibility, governance, and unit economics across cloud environments.

Visit DoiT Talk to our team

Story overview

What they say

DoiT was a true partner, not a vendor. They helped us understand the problem, refine the vision, and build something production-ready far faster than we could have on our own. Their expertise, responsiveness, and commitment made all the difference.

Dr. Anish Kapur, Founder & CEO, Promptly

DoiT's Customer Success and Forward Deployed Engineering teams work very closely with us. The regular sessions with our CSM keep us focused on the right priorities, and the FDEs provide the deep technical guidance we need to validate decisions and optimize our environment. That combination has been genuinely valuable for us.

Alexander Lundberg Santos, Platform Engineer at Extenda Retail

When we started working with DoiT, we deployed Flexsave to save time and reduce complexity. We still use it today. But what really stands out is the expert support. Having someone to collaborate with on deep cloud cost topics, someone who really understands the nuances, is incredibly valuable.

Jesper Terkelsen, CTO at Monta

DoiT's Cloud Accelerator turned our AI idea into a shipped product, saving at least three months of development and delivering reliable, explainable insights our customers trust.

Scott Desgrosseilliers, CEO and co-founder, Wicked Reports

DaySmart

Working with DoiT gave us the speed of a startup and the rigor of an enterprise R&D lab. We launched an AI feature in ninety days with zero engineering lift, unified our cloud visibility across multiple products and built a foundation to scale AI responsibly.

Tim Green, SVP of AI, DaySmart

Our AWS environment had grown rapidly, and complexity was outpacing control. DoiT helped us bring structure and clarity, aligning financial and technical decisions through a shared foundation.

Maurizio Trezzi, Director of IT, Vivaticket

DoiT gives us contextual insight into what's happening in our cloud environment. That helps us ensure we're meeting customer needs while managing our costs. It's that central pane of glass that lets engineering and finance work together, powered by the technology and backed by DoiT's people.

Matt Warner, Co-Founder and CEO at Blumira

For anyone considering DoiT: do it. The tools pay for themselves. We've reduced costs, improved visibility, and built a platform that can scale globally with control and confidence.

Matej Serbec, CTO, TradeLocker

DoiT didn't just give us a product – they gave us clarity. Cloud Diagrams has helped our teams understand what we're running, why we're running it, and where we can improve. The real-time visibility is a game changer for engineering, leadership, and everything in between.

Donnie Green, VP of Platform Engineering, Bloomerang

Sentric Music

With maybe 5-10 minutes, Ava had guided me right down into the low-level detail of the services that we were running in our compute environment, named the exact instances that were starting to chew through our money, produced a report for me that showed that this was almost a direct correlation to the cost growth that we were seeing, which meant that we were able to get on top of it pretty much immediately.

Stephen Roughley, Head of Engineering at Sentric Music

Atadex

With DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ managing our procurement and DoiT's engineers acting as an extension of my team, my costs are down, my efficiency is up, and my profitability is up

Mitch Bernet, Founder and CEO at Atadex

Skyral

A key takeaway for me working with DoiT is that the level of professionalism is extremely high. They're an obvious choice if you're looking for a partner to help implement best practices in your cloud environment and reduce cost.

Oliver Young, Senior Technical Manager at Skyral

We knew WhatsApp was the perfect channel for global remittances, but building secure, real-time conversations across languages was a massive challenge. DoiT helped us break through. They didn't just advise, they helped us architect and launch a GenAI solution that's 100x more powerful than what we had. We're now in a completely different league.

Jaime Gonzalez-Gasque, CEO, Reimagination Technologies

Your cloud bill shouldn't be a mystery

Let us show you what ships this week.

Book a demo