Presentation about the cost savings initiatives we run at HERE Technologies, shown at the AWS Pop-up loft Berlin in October 2018. Included a deep-dive and demo into our https://AutoSpotting.org open-source project.

1. Cost Efficiency
at Scale
Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu @magheru_san
Principal SRE at HERE Technologies, Berlin
AWS Pop-up Loft, 15 October 2018

2. We are making
sense of the world
through the lens
of location
HERE Technologies
through the lens
of location
© 2018 HERE Technologies2

3. On Demand Economy
9.5 B ARRobotics Quantum Computing
Megacities Artificial Intelligence Sustainability
Neural
Networks
Data Analytics
Location
Location
Location
Location
Location
Location
Location
Location
Location
Location
Location
Location
© 2018 HERE Technologies3

4. HERE Technologies in Numbers
© 2018 HERE Technologies4 We are HERE | November 20174
200
Countries mapped
4of5
In-car navigation
systems in Europe
and North America
use HERE maps
30+
Years of
experience
transforming
location
technology
8,000+Employees in 56 countries
focused on delivering the world’s best
map and location technologies
HERE Maps on board of
100Mvehicles and counting
3D data points
per second per car
700,000
collecting
data for
our
maps
400
HERE cars
28TB mapdata
collected
perday

5. Powered
through the lens
of location
HERE Technologies
© 2018 HERE Technologies5
by AWS

6. HERE Technologies and AWS
We run all our backends in the AWS cloud
• 100s of teams maintaining 450+ AWS accounts
• Mainly EC2, S3 & RDS
• 10000s of EC2 instances in 1000s of AutoScaling groups
• 10s of PB of data in S3
© 2018 HERE Technologies6
Photo by unknown author, licensed under CC BY-SA

7. Our AWS spending
is significant,
even small savings
matter a lot
HERE Technologies and AWS
© 2018 HERE Technologies7

8. Cost control measures
Multiplecomplementary/layered solutions
• Enterprise Discount Program
• Centralized Reserved Instance purchases
• Scheduled terminations and AutoScaling based on load
• Spot market automation
© 2018 HERE Technologies8
Image source https://www.bakingo.com/p/party-cake/3-tier-vanilla-cake-
part0157vani

9. Enterprise Discount Program
Fixed percentage applied on the final bills
• Long-term contract with AWS
• Applies as long as our spending is more than $X yearly
• ‘Hands-free’ for the product teams
© 2018 HERE Technologies9
Photo by unknown author licensed under CC BY

10. Reserved Instances
Purchased periodically
• Savings in the 40-50% range over on-demand
• Trying to maximize coverage while reducing waste
• Allocating RIs on the fly to running instances
• ‘Hands-free’ for the product teams
© 2018 HERE Technologies10

11. Scheduled terminations
Shut down development environments when not in use
And use AutoScaling for those that should run 24/7
• Each team defines its on/off schedules as tags set on their EC2 instances
• Lambda functions take action based on these tags
© 2018 HERE Technologies11
Shut down
over the
week-end
Shut down in the evening
Turn on in the morning
This saves about 70%

12. Spot Market Automation
Spot instances can generate significant savings
• Usually in the 60-90% range
• But...
• Are suitable only for certain workloads
• Often require automation and configuration changes
• The adoption effort usually offsets the short-term savings
© 2018 HERE Technologies12

13. Enter AutoSpotting
Replace AutoScaling Group nodes with identical spot instances
• Controlled by tags set on the groups: ‘spot-enabled=true’
• The Launch Configuration is unchanged
• Implemented as a Lambda function, deployed in minutes
• Open source since 2016
© 2018 HERE Technologies13

14. AutoSpotting Results
© 2018 HERE Technologies14
Savings in the 60-90% range over on-demand
• Rolled out to all our AWS accounts using a StackSet
• So far adopted by a small number of teams, but growing fast
• Median savings figure of ~75%

15. AutoSpotting Live Demo
© 2018 HERE Technologies15

16. Lessons learned
Keep it simple and painless to the product teams
They always have something of higher priority than cost savings
• Try to create ‘hands-free’, opt-out or trivial to use solutions
• Provide examples and clear documentation if they need to take any action
• Try not to cause significant impact on their work
© 2018 HERE Technologies16

17. Future Plans
Extend the RI purchasing program
• Purchase RIs for other services: RDS, ElastiCache, CloudFront, etc.
Expand the AutoSpotting rollout
• Switch it to opt-out mode on all Development AWS accounts
• Work with selected product teams to set it up on Production
© 2018 HERE Technologies17

18. Useful Links
• About HERE Technologies https://www.here.com
• About AutoSpotting https://autospotting.org
• Install AutoSpotting https://bit.ly/AutoSpotting
© 2018 HERE Technologies18

19. Thank you
Contact
@magheru_san
cristian.magherusan-stanciu@here.com