The Body Shop New Zealand is an online and brick-and-mortar retailer of beauty products, focused on natural and ethical products. Since 1989, it has had retail locations throughout New Zealand. Using Amazon Web Services since 2014, its products have been available for online sale as well.
The Body Shop New Zealand uses Amazon Web Services to host a fully-scalable e-commerce infrastructure and its testing environments. In addition, it hosts several internal-only servers using Amazon EC2.
Like many organizations, the internal-only EC2 instances are required during core business-hours only. To reduce costs, Rob Taylor, Operations Manager at The Body Shop New Zealand, looked for a robust method in which to run the internal-only EC2 instances only during business-hours.
Mr. Taylor was also looking for a reliable solution to automatically create EBS snapshots of the internal-only servers.
He was looking for a solution that met the following criteria:
The Body Shop New Zealand used Skeddly's Managed Instances to manage the EC2 instances' running-time and backups. Using Managed Instances, each EC2 instance was started at 5:00am. At 10:30pm, the instances were stopped. Daily backups were created in the form of EBS snapshots. These were done automatically at night while the EC2 instances were stopped.
Using this solution allowed The Body Shop New Zealand to save on their EC2 costs while the EC2 instances were not running. It also ensured that backups of the servers were created on a daily basis.
By stopping the EC2 instances at night, The Body Shop New Zealand saved over 30% of the cost of the EC2 instances. It also avoided the instance-type lock-in required if purchasing a reserved instance.
By using Skeddly to automate the creation of EBS snapshots, The Body Shop New Zealand ensured that their internal servers were protected in the event of a disaster.
"This was one of the primary reasons for choosing Skeddly for these servers, it can all be done manually but people make mistakes, scheduled tasks don't!"
Using Skeddly to control EC2 instances is a very inexpensive solution. Using this solution, The Body Shop New Zealand was able to achieve a return on investment (ROI) of 1,256%.
"I was recommended Skeddly and didn't bother looking at anything else as it provided everything I needed for a realistic cost."
When asked if he would recommend Skeddly to others, Rob replied "Yes, already have...".
Reduce costs and create backups of your own EC2 instances. Sign-up for our 30-day free trial, or sign-in to your Skeddly account to get started today.