Table of contents
About the client
Staffbase is the first AI-native Employee Experience Platform, putting the power of AI in every employee’s hands, especially those currently disconnected on the front lines. With Employee AI, Staffbase brings together communications, IT, and HR to reimagine how people and organisations work together.
More than 1500 enterprise customers — including Adidas, Alaska Airlines, DHL, MAN Truck & Bus, and Whataburger — use Staffbase to inspire their people and help them deliver their best work.
Uncovering cloud savings
After acquiring an email communication tool from a Canadian company, Staffbase continued running it on an inherited AWS infrastructure, keeping the setup mostly as-is, with only minor adjustments. With no cloud infrastructure optimisation scheduled, our primary role was to ensure a smooth transition of the app from the previous team and provide ongoing product support afterwards.
While working in the application environment, however, our engineer identified opportunities for significant AWS cost optimisation.
Taking initiative, he followed up on the findings and conducted a thorough FinOps assessment, identifying key optimisation areas and estimating a minimum of 25% in annual savings, with potential for substantially higher gains.
With that knowledge, we proposed a comprehensive cloud cost optimisation plan to our client.
Quick wins for immediate savings
Building on the recommendations, early optimisation efforts resulted in quick but significant savings:
- Closing unutilised accounts
After making sure that specific AWS accounts didn’t host any active workloads, our joint support team deleted them along with all their resources, saving 30% of the organisation’s European cloud footprint.
- Rightsizing overprovisioned resources
We ran a thorough review of compute resources; the analysis revealed a number of tasks with overprovisioned CPU and memory. Downsizing them resulted in savings of approximately 10% of total compute spend.
- ElastiCache nodes cleanup and rightsizing
When exploring further optimisation opportunities, we identified suboptimal configurations in the ElastiCache service, including overprovisioned nodes suitable for rightsizing or removal. These quick-win actions were implemented immediately, reducing caching costs by 20%.
Targeted database upgrade
Some instances were still running a legacy MySQL engine, which not only posed potential operational complications but also incurred additional charges for AWS Extended Support.
This database optimisation required a more targeted approach from the support team.
To minimise the app’s downtime for users, we worked jointly to plan and prepare the blue-green database upgrade and schedule maintenance windows outside business hours. Throughout the process, we ensured clear communication with Staffbase’s clients.
We ran the upgrade in all geographies for both staging and production environments, resulting in an annual RDS cost reduction of around 50%.
Future recommendations
In a comprehensive report, we provided Staffbase with a list of further cost optimisation possibilities, including:
- Workload management – scheduling development and staging resources, such as ECS tasks, RDS instances, and ElastiCache nodes to scale down to zero when not used, can reduce costs by a further 50-60% in non-production environments.
- Replacing the Redis OSS engine with the AWS-supported Valkey alternative can save up to 20%.
- Commitment discounts – we advised Staffbase that once all recommended usage optimisations were completed, they could explore rate optimisation options such as Savings Plan and Reserved Instances, with the potential to unlock an additional 20% in annual savings.
- Cost visibility and control improvement through FinOps best practices in budgeting and alerting.
- Purchasing cloud through Future Processing – as a certified AWS Cloud Operations Competency Partner in Cloud Cost Management, we provide access to preferential AWS pricing, supporting further cost optimisation efforts.
FinOps consultancy
Leveraging our FinOps expertise, we also recommended lightweight, scalable cost monitoring practices for Staffbase, aligned with industry best practices.
Given stable AWS usage and a simple billing setup, we proposed setting up budget alerts, introducing cost allocation via tagging, enabling regular reviews in Cost Explorer, and incorporating cost forecasting from the early stages of product development.
These practices can be easily scaled across the organisation and future products, supporting long-term cost visibility and informed decision-making.
Main benefits of our collaboration
- Annual cloud database cost savings of 50% achieved with no disruption to service
- Additional quick wins: 20% savings on caching and 10% on compute
- Closing unused AWS accounts, bringing immediate financial impact
- Tailored optimisation actions based on in-depth FinOps assessment
- Clear recommendations for future cloud savings and FinOps maturity advancement