Braze is a lifecycle engagement platform used by marketing brands to help reach their customers in more relevant and engaging ways. To build these unique customer profiles for their clients, Braze uses both historical data collected from customer applications and innovative predictive modeling—plus the help of a couple of thousand AWS EC2 instances and a few hundred million API calls per hour.
Braze first challenge was scaling their infrastructure at a rapid pace while monitoring and governing their environment with complete transparency. Their second challenge was breaking their monolith application into microservices to be more efficient in their resource usage.
Here’s how they gained visibility into their cloud environment, drove accountability to individual teams and projects, and saved millions of dollars through Reserved Instance (RI) recommendations.
After a ‘build vs. buy’ debate revealed a high Total Cost of Ownership if this type of project was attempted internally (plus additional time and resources needed for ongoing maintenance), Braze decided to partner with both CloudHealth and Datadog to help them increase visibility into their AWS infrastructure while transforming and scaling their operations rapidly.
CloudHealth’s proven leadership in RI management, resource utilization, and cost optimization, coupled with Datadog’s Application Performance Management (APM) support, has provided Braze with the solutions needed to gain proper visibility for application development. Not only has the team saved millions of dollars thus far through CloudHealth’s RI recommendations, but the cost allocation reports have created a great culture of accountability across the organization.
“CloudHealth reporting allows me to keep the teams in check as we grow. When we are doing POCs or starting a new project I can easily check team spend every day and send an email to the users to make them aware. That is a huge benefit in terms of creating business awareness on what resources cost.”
Director of DevOps and Security, Braze
Braze’s leadership team has also found value in the partnership by correlating data between the two solutions to determine overall cloud usage and spend by individual customers to better understand where resources are being allocated. From there, executives can determine the profit margin produced by individual customers and campaigns.
