Candid: Bringing a smile to its cloud infrastructure

June 2024

Dental technology company optimizes AWS costs and enhances cloud infrastructure with DoiT's expertise

55%: Reduction in monthly cloud bill
16%: Savings on overall cloud spend
83%: RDS cost reduction

“As a customer, the fact we have someone we can rely on, who has our back, is very reassuring. With the console, DoiT provides technology that helps us manage costs, and it also provides really helpful customer service.”
Tony Bussieres
Staff DevOps Engineer at Candid

The Challenge

Candid aimed to eliminate wasted AWS cloud spend and gain confidence to scale while tapping expert guidance for cost optimization. The company needed to optimize AWS storage economics with governance rather than only reduce headline costs. One main cost was the size of its RDS database, where Candid was significantly over-provisioning, diverting budget from roadmap delivery.

The Solution

DoiT provided in-depth analysis of immediate efficiencies and long-term engineering benefits. Candid adopted Flexsave for Compute for automated savings, worked with DoiT CREs to redesign storage solutions and reduce RDS costs, implemented Cloud Analytics for real-time cost monitoring, and used Anomaly Detection to identify cost spikes quickly.

Results

Achieved 16% reduction in overall cloud spend with Flexsave for Compute automation
Cut monthly cloud bill by 55% after comprehensive cost optimization workshops
Reduced RDS costs by 83% through right-sizing database containers
Eliminated storage waste through S3 lifecycle policies and versioning hygiene
Built AI-powered tool with SageMaker to reduce case submission time by 1-5 minutes

Meet Candid

Candid was founded to offer transformative oral health care. Through best-in-class technology and its innovative approach to partnership, Candid aims to make the highest quality care accessible, approachable, and achievable for dental professionals and their patients. The company's flagship product, the CandidPro orthodontic system, is a comprehensive orthodontic solution customized to the needs of general dentists—bringing more clinical predictability, workflow efficiency, and profitability to clear aligner providers of all experience levels.

Automated savings with Flexsave for Compute

Candid wanted to identify savings on its AWS usage. DoiT recommended Flexsave for Compute, which automatically identifies and applies discounted rates to any of Candid's AWS EC2 workloads not already covered by commitments, freeing engineers from manual tracking. Candid's small team no longer has to spend hours each week reconfiguring their compute workloads or monitoring their commitments to make sure it is always getting the best available price.

Redesigning storage solutions with CRE expertise

When Candid began working with DoiT, it used a large RDS database to run the application that dentists use to submit patient cases. This was running up considerable costs for the company. After talking with DoiT's Cloud Reliability Engineers, the Candid team decided to reduce its RDS container size, significantly reducing the spend on its RDS database. The DoiT CREs also helped Candid manage its Amazon S3 storage costs by identifying default settings that were keeping old versions of files unnecessarily.

Building more efficient cloud infrastructure

Candid worked with DoiT to optimize its cloud usage, focusing on removing inefficiencies in its infrastructure. DoiT console enabled the Candid team to explore in depth what was happening across its cloud infrastructure, focus on cost reduction, and identify possible savings across the business. With Cloud Analytics, Candid can now identify rising costs as they happen, as opposed to reviewing them after they've been incurred, helping it to quickly identify savings and take action.

Cutting out cost anomalies

Candid can now identify cost anomalies in its cloud usage, with the help of DoiT console's Anomaly Detection feature. This alerts the Candid team to unexpected cost spikes, allowing them to take fast remedial action to help keep costs under control. The team spotted several cost anomalies during the past year, including an instance that cost $1,000 a day just because something was poorly configured. DoiT was quick to help investigate, pinpoint the problem, and stop the bleeding.

Helping build innovative use cases with AI

When Candid noticed dentists were spending considerable time manually inserting patients' dental images into their system, Candid used Amazon SageMaker to create an AI-powered tool to select the images automatically which has drastically reduced the time required for case submissions. DoiT worked with the Candid team to help develop the proof of concept and adhere to AWS best practices. DoiT also helped Candid to secure R&D credits from AWS, saving the company thousands of dollars on its SageMaker costs.

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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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