Case Studies ReachForce Containerizes 200+ AWS Instances with Portworx to Reduce Data Center Footprint and CPU Utilization

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	ReachForce Containerizes 200+ AWS Instances with Portworx to Reduce Data Center Footprint and CPU Utilization

ReachForce Containerizes 200+ AWS Instances with Portworx to Reduce Data Center Footprint and CPU Utilization

Technology Category	Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries	Software
Applicable Functions	Sales & Marketing Business Operation
Use Cases	Process Control & Optimization Predictive Maintenance Inventory Management
Services	Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services System Integration
Challenge	ReachForce, a company in the marketing automation space, was facing several challenges with their AWS data center. The data center, comprised of four environments (Dev, QA, Performance Lab, and Production), consisted of about 215 EC2 instances. The company had re-implemented their SaaS offering in a micro-services architecture, using a separate AWS instance for each microservice. However, this led to the need to maintain over 200 Linux OS instances, and their average CPU utilization was significantly below best industry practices. Additionally, their AWS EBS storage was severely under-utilized, with only 25% of purchased capacity being used. At the same time, EC2 instances were over-provisioned by 100%, increasing the cost of operating the ReachForce SaaS platform. Read More
About Customer	ReachForce is a company that operates in the marketing automation space. Their main function is to make marketing leads more valuable and actionable. Most leads are limited to business card information such as first name, last name, title, company, street address, email address, and phone number. These leads flow into marketing automation systems from a variety of sources. ReachForce is partnered with Marketo, Eloqua, and Salesforce, and their service can validate, deduplicate and enrich these leads with many more fields of information about the business. This enriched information can make a salesperson more effective and can also make sales automation much more effective. Read More
Solution	To address these challenges, ReachForce decided to re-implement their data center as a containerized architecture. They believed that they could reduce their data center footprint from 215 EC2 instances down to as few as fifteen using containers. They aimed to reach a CPU utilization of 25%. They set up the first development cluster in November and were about to roll out a preview of their first application based on containers. This application is a customer portal and consists of a database, a two-container SSO solution, and a customer web portal that reinforces the value proposition of their SaaS service. They used etcd and confd for service discovery and environment-specific configuration. The CI/CD pipeline was built out using Jenkins, containerized and with its workspace on a Portworx volume. They elected to go with AWS ECS for container orchestration. They also used Portworx Enterprise for cloud native storage and data management. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

Applicable Industries

Software

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing

Business Operation

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization

Predictive Maintenance

Inventory Management

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

System Integration

Challenge

ReachForce, a company in the marketing automation space, was facing several challenges with their AWS data center. The data center, comprised of four environments (Dev, QA, Performance Lab, and Production), consisted of about 215 EC2 instances. The company had re-implemented their SaaS offering in a micro-services architecture, using a separate AWS instance for each microservice. However, this led to the need to maintain over 200 Linux OS instances, and their average CPU utilization was significantly below best industry practices. Additionally, their AWS EBS storage was severely under-utilized, with only 25% of purchased capacity being used. At the same time, EC2 instances were over-provisioned by 100%, increasing the cost of operating the ReachForce SaaS platform.

About Customer

ReachForce is a company that operates in the marketing automation space. Their main function is to make marketing leads more valuable and actionable. Most leads are limited to business card information such as first name, last name, title, company, street address, email address, and phone number. These leads flow into marketing automation systems from a variety of sources. ReachForce is partnered with Marketo, Eloqua, and Salesforce, and their service can validate, deduplicate and enrich these leads with many more fields of information about the business. This enriched information can make a salesperson more effective and can also make sales automation much more effective.

Solution

To address these challenges, ReachForce decided to re-implement their data center as a containerized architecture. They believed that they could reduce their data center footprint from 215 EC2 instances down to as few as fifteen using containers. They aimed to reach a CPU utilization of 25%. They set up the first development cluster in November and were about to roll out a preview of their first application based on containers. This application is a customer portal and consists of a database, a two-container SSO solution, and a customer web portal that reinforces the value proposition of their SaaS service. They used etcd and confd for service discovery and environment-specific configuration. The CI/CD pipeline was built out using Jenkins, containerized and with its workspace on a Portworx volume. They elected to go with AWS ECS for container orchestration. They also used Portworx Enterprise for cloud native storage and data management.

Impact #1	Portworx aggregates all the EBS storage on the container hosts and thanks to thin provisioning, ReachForce was able to serve the same number of volumes and the same amount of data with half as much AWS storage.
Impact #2	Containerization, including mission-critical data services, allowed ReachForce to reduce their AWS compute footprint by 50%.
Impact #3	Because Portworx handles the connectivity between the containers and data, ReachForce’s container placement strategies can be quite simple. It is not necessary to ensure that the container is running on the same container host where the persistent volume exists in order to ensure application performance and availability.

Impact #1

Portworx aggregates all the EBS storage on the container hosts and thanks to thin provisioning, ReachForce was able to serve the same number of volumes and the same amount of data with half as much AWS storage.

Impact #2

Containerization, including mission-critical data services, allowed ReachForce to reduce their AWS compute footprint by 50%.

Impact #3

Because Portworx handles the connectivity between the containers and data, ReachForce’s container placement strategies can be quite simple. It is not necessary to ensure that the container is running on the same container host where the persistent volume exists in order to ensure application performance and availability.

Benefit #1	Reduced AWS compute footprint by 50%
Benefit #2	Served the same number of volumes and the same amount of data with half as much AWS storage
Benefit #3	Aimed to reach a CPU utilization of 25%

Benefit #1

Reduced AWS compute footprint by 50%

Benefit #2

Served the same number of volumes and the same amount of data with half as much AWS storage

Benefit #3

Aimed to reach a CPU utilization of 25%

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Overview

ReachForce Containerizes 200+ AWS Instances with Portworx to Reduce Data Center Footprint and CPU Utilization

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit