What prompts a software development company and manufacturer of chip design software to explore moving workloads to the public cloud? At Cadence Design Systems, it was a need to augment the compute needs of their developers, and provide greater agility and consistency in a cost-effective manner.
Cadence turned to Six Nines IT, a premier Information Technology consulting company specializing in helping businesses move to the public cloud. Six Nines provided resources which helped Cadence understand how AWS operates, how to best utilize resources offered by AWS, and ensure those resources could support developer needs.
Clearing the Fog
The journey began with migrating Cadence’s internal software development process, focusing on software regression testing. AWS allowed Cadence to isolate workloads and ensure users and applications didn’t compete for resources. The company was able to run faster, and significantly reduce job times.
“Running a single regression, which took one group 4-8 hours, now takes less than one hour.”
– Mike Stanton, IT Director, R&D Solutions for Cadence
Relying on the power of CloudHealth and expertise of Six Nines, Cadence was able to:
Optimize and cut costs with AWS reserved instances (RIs).
-
The CloudHealth RI Optimizer helps determine the most optimal reservation scenario based on budget.
-
User alerts and reporting provide insight into how well utilized RIs are (and any suggested modifications), and if any are near expiration.
-
Cadence and Six Nines are identifying windows in non-production environments when there’s not a lot of activity so they can automatically shut systems down and restart them when needed, which CloudHealth will help automate.
Stay within budget.
-
Cadence uses the CloudHealth budget feature to track by business unit and automatically receive reports and alerts to ensure they’re within budget.
-
CloudHealth Pulse reports enable Cadence and Six Nines to compare current cost and usage with last month and better analyze growth patterns for capacity planning.
A Sunny Outlook
Building on early success, Cadence and Six Nines are continuously identifying where it makes sense to transition environments to the cloud and exploring a multi-cloud approach.
“By using CloudHealth and the strengths of the largest cloud providers in the industry, we give our customers control and scalability of their infrastructure while maintaining strict cost controls and vendor flexibility. It’s a win-win for everyone.”
– Jason Cutrer, Founder and President, Six Nines
Pleased with the initial phase of the migration project, Stanton says: “The level of support we’ve received from CloudHealth Tech and Six Nines is unmatched.”
To learn more about how Cadence derives value from CloudHealth and Six Nines, check out the case study.
