Overview: Bobble AI is a dynamic tech company that has made a significant impact on the realm of digital communication. A major user of AWS Auto-scaling groups, Bobble had approximately 600 instances spinning up each month on average per ASG. They were facing challenges in optimizing their AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) due to limitations with Elastic Block Storage (EBS) management. Their EBS volumes were inefficiently provisioned, causing significant cost overruns and operational complexities. To address these issues, Bobble embarked on a journey to onboard Lucidity, an autonomous multi-cloud auto-scaler, into their ASG groups. This case study outlines how Bobble successfully integrated Lucidity into its AWS infrastructure and achieved remarkable results.

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Opportunity - Significantly reduce DevOps efforts in scaling EBS volumes.

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Bobble's ASGs primarily served stateless API workloads, and their EBS volumes stored essential data, including logs and request-response logs. Instead of relying on scheduled health checks to maintain instance reliability, Bobble adopted a 24-hour instance refresh cycle to proactively reduce the risk of downtime.

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Bobble implemented a routine where every 24 hours, existing instances were taken out of service, and new instances were deployed. This approach ensured that their ASG always contained fresh and up-to-date resources.

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The challenge lay in EBS volume management, where instance size was initially defined as 100GB in the Amazon Machine Image (AMI). When new instances are spun up, all instances inherit this size regardless of actual usage. Expanding or shrinking these volumes involved time-consuming processes, necessitating creation of new AMIs, scaling the volumes, and refreshing the entire cycle.

Bobble could resize during operations but they would go back to the original size every 24 hours during the instance refresh cycle. As a result, consistently upgrading and expanding becomes a monumental daily task. 

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Solution - Baking Lucidity Autoscaler into their AMI and launch template

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On average, Bobble had approximately 600 instances spinning up each month in one ASG, which equated to around 20 instances, amassing 2TB of storage daily. Lucidity helped develop the solution where the Lucidity Autoscaler agent could be integrated directly into their AMI for effortless ASG deployment. By using Bobble’s launch template, whenever an instance refresh cycle kicked in, Lucidity Autoscaler would be onboarded automatically into all the spun up EBS volumes. This seamless integration meant Lucidity automatically scales each volume based on the workload needs while always maintaining a 70-80% healthy utilization. 

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In other words, Lucidity eliminated the complexity of resizing EBS volumes within the ASG. Instead of having to code and create new AMIs and refresh the entire cycle, Bobble now enjoys a more streamlined  and low-touch process. Lucidity seamlessly handled the provisioning of EBS volumes, and effortlessly handled the scale of 600+ instances being spun up every month.

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Kunal Dawn, VP Engg, says: "Lucidity is providing us services that helps us to align to pay for what we actually use. They helped us achieve 80% utilization, reducing our DevOps requirements for managing EBS volumes, and giving us amazing cost optimization”

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Listen to his complete testimonial here:

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Benefits

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1. Lucidity's integration resulted in significant cost savings, as over-provisioned EBS volumes were reduced. Bobble was able to reduce storage costs by as much as 48%.

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2. Effort previously expended on upgrading volumes in the AMI and dealing with complex expansion processes was saved. Bobble presently saves 3-4 hours/week in DevOps efforts.

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In conclusion, Bobble's integration of Lucidity with their AWS Auto Scaling Groups not only addressed their EBS volume challenges but also enhanced efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Lucidity's capabilities in auto-scaling and optimizing storage resources transformed their ASG management, enabling the company to maintain high performance while reducing operational overhead and costs. This successful case study showcases the value of Lucidity's integration in optimizing AWS infrastructure for enterprises like Bobble.

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