Client: Uplers
Industry: HR Tech / Talent Platform
Engagement Type: AWS Cloud Consulting & Optimization

The Challenge

As Uplers’ AWS environment scaled to support growing business demands, the company began facing challenges related to cost efficiency, security posture, and operational visibility. AWS spending was increasing due to underutilized resources, legacy snapshots, and inefficient storage usage. At the same time, limited monitoring and reactive governance made it difficult to proactively manage performance and security risks.

Without intervention, these challenges posed a risk of uncontrolled cloud spend, security exposure, and reduced operational efficiency.

This engagement was delivered for an SMB HR-tech organization requiring improved cost control, security visibility, and operational insight without disrupting a fast-growing production platform.

Discovery

DevOps TechLab conducted a detailed discovery and assessment phase to understand Uplers’ AWS environment and business priorities. This included:

– Review of EC2, EBS, S3, IAM, and Load Balancer usage
– Analysis of AWS billing trends and resource utilization
– Identification of unused and underutilized resources
– Security posture assessment covering IAM users, security groups, and S3 access
– Evaluation of monitoring gaps and operational visibility

This discovery phase helped identify immediate optimization opportunities without requiring architectural disruption.

Onboarding

Following discovery, DevOps TechLab onboarded Uplers into a structured optimization and governance workflow:

– Defined scope focused on cost optimization, security hardening, and monitoring
– Established change validation and approval approach
– Aligned recommendations with AWS Well-Architected best practices
– Prepared a phased execution plan to avoid impact on production workloads
– Recommendations and changes were designed to be manageable by a lean internal engineering team after engagement completion.

Operations & Support

During execution, DevOps TechLab supported Uplers with controlled implementation and operational guidance:

– Safe cleanup of unused snapshots, volumes, and stopped instances
– EC2 right-sizing based on real utilization and AWS Compute Optimizer insights
– Monitoring deployment using Prometheus and Grafana
– Alert integration with Google Chat for proactive issue detection
– Ongoing validation to ensure production stability

All changes were reviewed and verified before and after implementation.

Optimisation & Advisory

Beyond implementation, DevOps TechLab provided continuous advisory support:

– Guidance on AWS Savings Plans adoption
– S3 lifecycle policy design for long-term cost efficiency
– Security recommendations based on IAM and Inspector findings
– Advisory on future governance improvements and continuous optimization

This ensured Uplers could sustain improvements beyond the engagement.

Architecture Overview

The optimized AWS architecture leveraged existing AWS services without major redesign:

– EC2 workloads optimized for utilization and cost
– Amazon S3 with lifecycle policies transitioning older data to Glacier Instant Retrieval
– Application Load Balancer for traffic distribution
– AWS CloudTrail and VPC Flow Logs for audit and visibility
– Prometheus and Grafana for centralized monitoring and alerting

The architecture emphasized cost efficiency, security, and observability, aligned with AWS best practices.

Outcome

As a result of this engagement, Uplers achieved:

– Significant recurring AWS cost savings through targeted optimization
– Improved visibility into infrastructure utilization and performance
– Stronger AWS security posture through IAM and security reviews
– Proactive monitoring and alerting for operational stability
– An AWS environment better aligned with Well-Architected principles
– Achieved recurring AWS cost reduction through removal of idle resources and optimized storage usage
– Improved monitoring coverage enabling faster detection of performance and capacity issues
– Reduced operational overhead through proactive alerting and governance recommendations

These outcomes enabled Uplers to scale confidently while maintaining predictable cloud costs.

AWS Best Practices Applied

– Cost Optimization: Resource cleanup, right-sizing, Savings Plans, S3 lifecycle policies
– Security: IAM review, Inspector-based recommendations, audit logging
– Operational Excellence: Monitoring, alerting, phased execution
– Reliability: Controlled changes and validation

About DevOps TechLab

DevOps TechLab is an AWS consulting and cloud optimization company specializing in helping SMBs and fast-growing organizations build secure, scalable, and cost-efficient AWS environments. With deep expertise in AWS best practices, DevOps TechLab delivers measurable business value through cloud consulting, cost optimization, monitoring, and governance.