CloudNatix helps largest Japanese consumers' organization automate cloud optimization & cut costs

Summary

Co-op Tohoku is a business association of 7 co-op groups in the Tohoku region. It has 120 stores and 54 delivery depots, and it plays a vital role as life infrastructure by providing various services including store, delivery, and services (e.g., insurance).

The union was working on a transformation that actively adopts digital technology and accelerates their move to public cloud, and as part of this, Co-op Tohoku was migrating various systems including mission-critical business systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS). CloudNatix Platform helped Co-op Tohoku in visualizing cost and identifying automated optimization opportunities.

The Challenge

In 2021, Co-op Tohoku had total sales of 262.1 billion JPY between its stores (155.7 billions JPY, 104.6% growth) and delivery business (95 billions JPY, 115.5% growth). Since 2019, Co-op Tohoku has offered customers a smartphone application that provides order and payment services and is used by one hundred thousand users.

As Co-op Tohoku transitioned to cloud, it became critical that the company had the capability to visualize and optimize cloud cost accurately and quickly. Concurrently, they were finding it challenging to automate its cloud VM operations.

Results with CloudNatix

CloudNatix Platform was able to accelerate the Co-op Tohoku's operations at every stage in its cloud journey, from initial migration to full production and expansion.

CloudNatix's dashboards and insights provided holistic visibility and automation for Co-op Tohoku to monitor its back-end systems built on AWS. This unprecedented visibility helped take the guesswork out of operations. It provided simple yet powerful UIs for visualizing cloud costs while automatically identifying optimization opportunities.

Development and operation teams were able to share the recommendations provided by CloudNatix Platform to quickly optimize cost efficiency techniques, such as right sizing and scheduling the start and stop of EC2 instances. The productivity of the developers and DevOps subsequently increased tremendously using the CloudNatix Platform.

Co-op Tohoku has successfully lifted a Windows client application from on-prem to AWS, and now plans to lift an additional ~500 VMs in total. As part of the initial migration effort, the co-op decided to set up 12 Windows remote desktop client VMs so that internal users can continue to access the client application in the same way as they did while on-prem. While this model worked successfully, it was causing a lot of additional and unnecessary costs. For example, EC2 instances were running during non-business hours while there were no active users despite AWS charging based on EC2 instance run time.

With CloudNatix, Co-op Tohoku was able to stop these remote desktop client VMs when they are not used to recoup these costs. CloudNatix Operations Manager allowed the customer to start and stop EC2 instances using a predetermined schedule. By creating schedules for stopping EC2 instances during non-business hours, Co-op Tohoku was able to save 50% of cost from the 12 remote desktop client VMs.

CloudNatix has also been expanded to Co-op Pay, the customer's electronic payment service, where it is providing visibility and recommendation into their AWS Auto Scaling groups across 6 VPCs (2 VPCs for prod, 2 VPCs for staging, and 2 VPCs for dev).

Based on this initial success, CloudNatix will continue to be used to monitor and optimize Co-op Tohoku’s AWS infrastructure as migration expands and more VMs are lifted from on-prem to AWS.