Case Study: Bede Gaming

Welcome, James! First, tell me about the original impetus around why you guys at Bede Gaming questioned your Azure spend. Where did that come from?

Previously, we’ve never had a proper framework in terms of costs.

Our people have done their best individually but there’s never been really a company so on it because our bills never really looked too bad. However, we’ve had a new CCO join the business who wanted us to investigate clouds a little bit more, so we decided to use some of our hours on cost optimization before the end of the year.

We did see some light savings through that process, but it got us thinking about how we can control our cloud costs in a different way. It was very ad hoc before people had linked us on and it looked a bit expensive.

Got it, that’s interesting. When you say the cloud costs weren’t that bad, was it just because these things scaled up and so you kind of lost track of them?

I think. I think that could say very fair way is putting it. Yeah. I think it might have been building up like that for about three years. During that time, we stopped resources, needed to scale up, experienced a momentary incident, and then typically forgot to remember to address the growth.

So it’s sort of like one of those like due diligence or spring-cleaning things that you just kind of put off and put off.

Yeah, pretty much. That’s, that’s pretty much exactly it. It was just not very controlled, and we were still a pretty small organization, I think with 160 people overall. The challenge was trying to find some time to actually investigate costs.

So, when you began looking for alternative solutions, did you consider other resources besides US Cloud?

So, talking to our technical account manager (TAM), Chris, we were coming up towards about the three-quarter mark on the contract. And I said we’ve still got a lot of outstanding hours. What kind of things can you guys do for us to use these up efficiently? We’ve paid for the hours, so we didn’t want to let them go to waste.

We asked, “Is there going to be some value that we can get out of these hours?” We had a number of different projects going around. Then Chris mentioned that US Cloud has a big cost analysis piece. We went for it so we could “button down the hatches” and make our service efficient to run.

And when you went through that cost optimization process, what did you guys find?

A lot of low hanging fruit (just for a very short organization), as well as lots of very high-level fixes. He discovered several things that we could do for our storage. Can V2 is one place where we could start. Dropping stuff into optical cold storage.

So we don’t have any tiered storage, but we’ve got lots of good suggestions. It’s stuff that we knew about like the storage accounts and migrating them into feet, too. There were lots of things we found that have been running for three years that no one was checking in on.

These VMs were, I don’t know, 10 grand a month? Not like a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once we got to $40k or $50k a month…it really starts to add up

That’s a win already.

Definitely, definitely. It’s definitely appreciated upstairs within the finance team.

Okay, so you had mentioned, you’re talking 40 or 50 Grand of savings per month which keeps finance happy. Was there another specific way through which that money got reinvested in the company? Or was it sort of just sent back into the budget pot?

We ended up not driving it into any specific resource and just reallocated it to wherever the budget was most needed.

Okay, cool. That’s still a great quick win for a new CIO coming in. Is this something that you guys have talked about or shared with each other? This Azure creep thing is a pretty common thing.

Actually, we were in a strange spot because we’re in the iGaming space—a lot of us don’t communicate with each other. It’s not a completely open environment.

We’re paying for hosting, but this there is some information sharing. For example, we’ll share the way we’re moving to Mongo or using cast AI to make clusters cheaper.

Yeah that makes sense.

It’s the nature of the industry as a whole. Your price affects how you can operate your platform. That is a big decider in a lot of contractual discussions.

That makes sense, too. Is there anything else about the process you think would make sense to share or discuss?

We found a lot of value in the visual representation tool that we were using during the process.

Are you referring to the Microsoft cost analysis?

Yes. That tool allowed us to make some quick wins. Really quick. Like tracking down these VMs that were just turned on for three years. And they were fairly big machines as well.

There were lots of other quick wins, too, with getting rid of this for 100 month or that for 50 and it sounds like a lot of money when you spend five billion a year, but considering the fact that these are monthly ongoing savings, that’s going to build up over time. Yeah, it’s 50 quid now. Within 10 months. That’s 500. That’s a team meal for a year. This is how I’ve kind of been looking at it.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So, coming back around to the responsiveness to suggestions and feedback, presented to the team that was doing this—this was really good. They came to us with big suggestions based on how we’re a small group but still a very high-technical organization.

Like how we might not be quite right to suggest scaling in the database. If you do, that shrinks your data capacity, which would then mean the database now has 100, which was scaled in. All these little fixes that would get fixed and then we’d be like, “Oh yeah, they should have been put there last week” based on how useful they ended up being. I was pretty impressed by that.

Additionally, the CEO of the account was actually there walking us through some of these cost-saving things. You wouldn’t expect the CEO to be jumping on a call with customers to be going through a technical discussion with a customer, so that really impressed me.

Yeah. Yeah, that is a nice service. That’s an excellent place for us to end. Thank you for your time and your business!

No problem. Have a great day!

Thanks! You, too. Take care!