Breaking the bottleneck to give entrepreneurs a faster path to success

August 2024

DoiT helps ablefy improve database performance to achieve fast page load speeds and cut RDS costs by 65%

Up to 10x: Faster page load speeds
65%: Reduction in database costs
14%: Savings on compute instances

“We love working with DoiT. We get cloud optimization experts who can significantly reduce our costs, as well as experienced mentors and sparring partners to help us improve our architecture and experiment with new approaches. We look forward to continuing our collaboration.”
Alex Ischenko
VP of Engineering at ablefy

The Challenge

ablefy experienced rapid growth that created performance bottlenecks in its Amazon RDS database, impacting page load speeds and putting customer-facing SLOs at risk. The company's cloud infrastructure had been assembled quickly during startup growth, creating challenges around performance and cost predictability. Amazon RDS had become one of the largest cost drivers with uneven unit economics.

The Solution

DoiT's Cloud Reliability Engineers worked with ablefy to address the underlying architectural causes of RDS performance issues. They recommended changing the instance type to handle more IOPS and switching to a more cost-efficient storage layer. DoiT also helped introduce a caching layer and provided ongoing optimization through DoiT Console and Flexsave for Compute.

Results

65% reduction in RDS database costs, saving thousands of dollars per month
Up to 10x faster page load speeds through database optimization
14% savings on EC2 instances with Flexsave for Compute
Improved customer satisfaction scores and positive stakeholder feedback
Embedded FinOps governance practices for predictable unit economics

Meet ablefy

ablefy is the all-in-one platform for digital growth, enabling more than 68,000 entrepreneurs to create online courses, member areas, e-ticketing, and digital payment interfaces. Founded in Germany in 2017, and securing Series A funding four years later, ablefy has grown to a team of 200 employees. It is now scaling up and expanding internationally as it empowers global entrepreneurs to monetize their digital offerings.

A faster database service, a smaller cloud bill

Cloud Reliability Engineers worked with ablefy to address the underlying architectural causes of the RDS performance issues, with dedicated CRE Pol Alzina being allocated to support the company in reviews and implementations. Alzina recommended changing the instance type to one that could handle more input/output operations per second (IOPS) to relieve contention without code changes. He also advised changing the storage layer to a more cost-efficient type, resulting in a ~90% reduction in RDS costs while maintaining performance and reliability targets. Among these additional architectural changes is the introduction of a caching layer to handle certain data requests, freeing up RDS for other tasks and helping to reduce page load speeds for the end consumer.

Gaining control of cloud expenditure with DoiT Console

ablefy is making significant progress in reducing its overall cloud expenditure with the help of DoiT Console. Alex's engineering team uses Cloud Analytics daily to gain insights into its cloud architecture, allocate costs to specific operations and workloads, and improve cloud governance through Real-Time Anomaly Detection. With regular consultations with the DoiT team and an open messaging channel, ablefy works with DoiT to understand where expenditure can be reduced without sacrificing performance. ablefy also uses DoiT Flexsave for Compute to save on its compute spend by automatically identifying and applying discounted rates to EC2 workloads not already covered by commitments.

Building the right infrastructure for global expansion

ablefy is now working with DoiT to design its architecture to best support its plans to scale globally. This includes a decision to use Amazon CloudFront as its content delivery network, helping deliver content quickly and efficiently. This will allow ablefy to provide a better user experience in international markets while optimizing data transfer and egress costs. As ablefy continues working with DoiT to refine its architecture and support global expansion, the two teams are introducing governed AI services with clear cost guardrails.

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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

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