How Discover cut $1.4 million from its annual AWS budget in two game days

How Discover cut $1.4 million from its annual AWS budget in two game days 2 Days, $1.4 million Tagging workloads Technology and developer culture Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform | Product Trial About the author Alex Handy More like this Blog post Blog post Original podcast Original podcast Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share Do you remember shared cell phone plans? At the turn of the century, a whole family might share the same pool of mobile phone minutes, and it only took a few hours of idle chatter on the phone to drain the account of all remaining minutes of talk time for everyone. Well, a similar phenomenon is currently happening in the cloud today. Anyone who's ever touched a public cloud has likely encountered an accidental overage payment. That's a problem, but it's even more problematic that it's deceptively easy to overlook a single instance of this when you're dealing in hundreds at a time. At Discover, the financial services company recently acquired by Capital One, developers found a way to solve their overage problems—and implement serious cost savings. It’s not surprising that a company offering credit cards would understand the value of cost optimization in the cloud. What is surprising, however, is that in those two days, they managed to cut their cloud bill by $1.4 million each year. Discover moved onto Red Hat OpenShift in 2022. Prior to that, the company had been attempting to solidify on CloudFoundry, the Platform-as-a-Service often promoted by Pivotal, VMware, and Broadcom. Craig Katz, OpenShift Director at Discover, said that Discover now uses OpenShift to manage its container infrastructure inside of Amazon Web Services. In order to migrate their existing 1,200 workloads to OpenShift and Amazon Web Services, the decision was made early on to focus on the speed and quality of the transition, and to push cost concerns to the side. As Katz put it, "You can choose two: fast, cheap, or good.