FinOps at FanDuel, working with AWS on cost efficiencies

Written by Neil Innes, Senior Cloud Platforms Manager

Background

Thursday 3rd November saw FanDuel and AWS team up; not only for FanDuel’s first EBA day, but AWS’s first ever EBA day in EMEA.

Hang on, too many acronyms, what does EBA mean?

Experience Based Acceleration is the answer, and the definition is as follows:

“Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) is a transformation methodology using hands-on, agile, immersive interactions to accelerate an organisation’s cloud adoption. The methodology is used in customer-facing activities we call Parties.”

In this instance, the “party” in question was centred around FinOps and like all good parties, there were gifts for attendees, but we’ll get to that. The intention of the day was to work through a list of previously identified and agreed areas of FanDuel’s AWS usage which could be changed, cleaned up or deprecated to realise savings on our, not insignificant, monthly AWS spend on services.

What went on?

Where the EBA day had significant advantage is that it allowed a working group of representatives on both sides to collaborate on changes. FanDuel were able to leverage the extensive AWS product knowledge in the room to make changes that otherwise may have languished in technical debt backlogs, near the bottom of to-do piles or been regarded as low priority work- changes which if implemented, could deliver noticeable change to the bottom-line.

As an example, Chris from AWS delivered a technical presentation on EC2 Spot Instances, designed to cut through some of the half-truths and old limitations that have become accepted faults within the solution. From this, we were then able to prototype and establish a proof of concept where our development EC2 stacks could be provisioned from the AWS Spot EC2 fleet, as opposed to the on-demand fleet. Ultimately, in its first iteration we were unable to continue with the proof of concept as the delivered solution, but from momentum gained on the day and exploration of other tooling in EC2, changes are being made which will deliver savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars over 12 months.

Aside from the more experimental work done on the day, AWS were able to provide us with targeted data on resources within our platforms which were not being utilised and were superfluous to our Cloud needs. Having an AWS technical resource on site to work through the list of resources alongside a FanDuel engineer (with the context of what the resources do) meant that during a concise workshop session, savings were made on these resources of over $15,000/month.

Additionally, we undertook separate work to identify networking activity which was comprising a growing part of our daily AWS spend. This involved setting up enhanced logging, under AWS guidance, on the identified resources which were suspected to be contributing to the increasing spend. While we had to leave this analysis running after the completion of the session, within a day or two we had crystallised data which enabled us to target and reduce the spend by adopting a more cost-sympathetic architecture.

What’s next?

This is by no means the end of FanDuel and AWS collaborating on FinOps exercises, it is better described as an intensification of ideas and goals which we had already been talking about. It’s apparent that globally, technology businesses are looking to make savings to offset the effects of economic slowdowns in the territories they operate in.

FanDuel are setting the performance bar for companies in our sector extremely high but like in all elite-level competition, it’s the extra 1 or 2% that separates the winner from the others on the podium. If we can deliver all the savings identified on the day, from the proof of concepts to the architecture changes, it wouldn’t just be a 1 or 2% improvement in our monthly AWS service spend, we could be achieving optimisation of between 5 and 6 percent. By any measure, this is a great achievement by the engineering teams, given that we had just a single day to work with.

As the NFL season hurtles towards the playoffs and the Superbowl in February, we are looking ahead to targeting future EBA days when the NFL dust settles. Future days may be targeted more to specific technologies or it may be a division based approach.

FanDuel were proud to take part in the inaugural EMEA EBA party with AWS, and we look forward to further successful parties.

We are always looking for talented people to join us. If you are interested in working in an environment with great culture, great benefits, modern tech stack and serious employee-growth opportunities, don’t forget to check out our careers page.

FinOps at FanDuel, working with AWS on cost efficiencies was originally published in FanDuel Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.