Case Study - FinOps Methodology Brings Significant Savings for AGC Glass Europe
AGC Glass Europe, one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of glass for architectural, automotive, and specialized applications, partnered with Necko Technologies to optimize their AWS cloud infrastructure, enhance security measures, and implement FinOps strategies to manage and minimize cloud expenses.
- Client
- AGC Glass Europe
- Year
- Service
- FinOps, Professional Services
Making Sense of Complex Distributed Systems
With 15,300 employees working across more than 100 sites throughout Europe, AGC Glass Europe operates a sophisticated hybrid infrastructure combining on-premises and cloud services. Their technology stack supports day-to-day office applications alongside specialized Internet of Things (IoT) systems, logistics, quality control, and manufacturing systems.
AGC Glass Europe approached Necko Technologies with the goal of improving and optimizing their cloud infrastructure to enhance operational efficiency and reduce costs. Having previously collaborated with us on an AWS Well-Architected review, they were confident in our understanding of their business and organizational culture.
- Reduction in annual AWS costs
- 22%
- Visibility into AWS resource usage
- Improved
- User access management
- Integrated
- Application onboarding
- Streamlined
We really like Necko's pragmatic approach. They took us seriously from the start, and they know AWS inside and out
Our Approach: Finding Simple Savings First
As an AWS Partner, Necko Technologies began by conducting a thorough analysis of AGC's monthly expenses through the AWS Billing Console and AWS Cost Explorer. This approach provided a clear visualization of their current AWS spending patterns.
Our optimization efforts included:
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Database Optimization: We optimized AGC Glass Europe's Amazon Redshift cluster by refining database storage strategies, resulting in a 50% reduction in service costs.
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Backup Strategy Refinement: Analysis of workloads revealed a third-party database running complete disk backups. By implementing incremental backups instead, we achieved a 66% reduction in service costs through decreased disk space usage.
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Backup Schedule Optimization: We right-sized the backup frequency and identified anomalous backup processes, cutting total backup costs by 50%.
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Strategic Reserved Instance Usage: We implemented a more strategic approach to reserved instance allocation, contributing to overall savings of 22% on annual costs.
Ongoing Value: Weekly Optimization Reviews
Our engagement with AGC Glass Europe continues through weekly meetings, providing them with deeper insights into their AWS usage and identifying additional cost-saving opportunities. These regular reviews have supported several strategic initiatives:
- Workload Migration: Supporting AGC's migration from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service with containerization of workloads
- Environmental Impact Reduction: Implementing AWS Graviton Processors for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) workloads
- Serverless Computing: Leveraging AWS Lambda for efficient code execution without managing servers or clusters
The serverless approach has been particularly valuable for AGC's glass quality testing processes, enabling them to rapidly deploy virtual machines for complex spectrum calculations and then decommission resources when processing is complete.
AWS is good at presenting us with new services and ways to reduce our expenses, and Necko Technologies is good at making those services actually work for us and implementing those cost reductions
Security Enhancement: Simplifying Secure Access
Beyond cost optimization, Necko Technologies helped AGC improve their security posture by streamlining user access to AWS accounts. We integrated AWS permission profiles with Microsoft Active Directory, which previously had no connection to third-party systems.
This integration has delivered significant benefits:
- Simplified creation of properly configured AWS access profiles for new employees
- Automated permission removal for departing staff
- Ensured appropriate access controls across company AWS systems
- Accelerated onboarding processes
- Facilitated clean separation during a recent business divestment
Future Initiatives: IoT Manufacturing Data Migration
While AGC is satisfied with their current IoT infrastructure, we're exploring the potential implementation of AWS Outposts to provide a fully managed, on-premises AWS solution for a consistent hybrid experience. This approach addresses AGC's requirements for:
- Factory-based processes with strict latency and availability requirements
- Supporting bespoke systems that would be challenging to migrate directly to the cloud
Additionally, Necko Technologies is evaluating AWS IoT Greengrass to help AGC build intelligent IoT devices more efficiently. This would enable:
- Remote and scalable deployment, management, and configuration of IoT device software
- Simpler integration of IoT data with their data lake for advanced analytics
- Generation of deeper business insights from manufacturing operations
We're eager to use more AWS services and for Necko Technologies to help us implement them in the most cost-effective way