Precise Analysis, Unified Visibility and a Partner in Every Sprint

DoiT engaged the Luxury Escapes platform team through its Cloud Intelligence platform, pairing intelligent tooling with hands-on engineering expertise. For Chiamaka's team, the difference wasn't just what DoiT could see. It was what DoiT did with what it saw.

A Reserved Instance Strategy Built on Real Usage Data

DoiT's Forward Deployed Engineers and Customer Success Manager analysed daily RDS usage patterns and performance metrics across the Luxury Escapes estate, building a picture of how workloads actually behaved rather than how they were assumed to behave. That analysis identified clear opportunities to right-size instances and shift to a Reserved Instance model calibrated to real demand.

The outcome was a tailored strategy that now covers 70% to 80% of Luxury Escapes' Aurora RDS workload, delivering approximately $7,000 to $8,000 in direct savings. DoiT's engineers went further, reviewing Aurora cluster storage configurations and identifying specific workloads where a shift to I/O Optimized storage made both performance and cost sense. A configuration detail most teams would overlook became a compounding efficiency gain.

CloudFlow: Visibility, Governance and Commitment Monitoring

With the Reserved Instance strategy in place, Satyam Gupta, introduced CloudFlow to give the team the tools to monitor and protect that investment. Through automated reporting in CloudFlow, Chiamaka's team gained visibility of Reserved Instance expiration dates and utilisation rates across the estate, allowing it to act ahead of expiring commitments rather than discovering them after the fact.

CloudFlow also addressed a broader governance challenge. For a team previously context-switching between 25 separate AWS accounts, it provided a single, unified view of what was running across the entire estate. Automated alerting meant that new resources created inside a deprecated account triggered an immediate notification, turning a process that had relied on manual checks into a controlled, auditable workflow.

Present Every Sprint, Not Just at Quarterly Reviews

Satyam checked in with Chiamaka's team multiple times per sprint, surfacing new platform capabilities and providing active support through the App Mesh migration and ongoing Aurora cluster work. When the team hit problems that needed specialist knowledge, Satyam connected them with the right DoiT engineers quickly. Cost attribution was configured across teams and services so anomalies could trace back to their root cause without delay.

Luxury Escapes isn't slowing down, and the platform team's ambitions for the AWS estate reflect that. Over the next 12 months, the focus shifts from establishing the FinOps practice to deepening it. CloudFlow's resource visualisation and governance capabilities have more to give, and Chiamaka's team plans to expand how they use them as familiarity with the platform grows.

The AWS App Mesh migration continues with active support from DoiT's engineers. Further Aurora storage optimisation work remains in the pipeline. And as the platform adds accounts, services and spend, the partnership model that made the first wave of results possible scales with it.

For Chiamaka, that continuity matters as much as any individual outcome. A partner who shows up every sprint, knows the estate and brings the right expertise at the right moment isn't a vendor. It's infrastructure for the team itself.

Luxury Escapes gives travellers access to curated premium holidays across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. When a customer books through the platform, they're trusting it to handle everything: finding the right experience, processing payment and personalising what comes next. That trust depends entirely on a technology platform that performs reliably at scale.

Chiamaka Ibeme, Engineering Manager for Platform at Luxury Escapes, carries much of the responsibility for that reliability. Her team owns the infrastructure, developer experience, DevOps, CI pipelines and security underpinning the full customer journey. As the business grew, so did the complexity of the AWS environment they managed, spanning 25 accounts and a diverse set of services including Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon OpenSearch Service and AWS App Mesh.

Chiamaka knew the estate needed more rigour. Cloud spend had reached approximately 500,000 Australian dollars per month, and the tools and processes her team relied on weren't built for an environment of that scale. Without better visibility and tighter governance, cost could quietly spiral while engineering attention stayed focused on delivery.

"The goal," she says, "was to stay on top of our cloud costs and make sure it doesn't go out of proportion."