WebBeds makes significant cost savings with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and AWS Graviton
Fast-growing B2B travel intermediary WebBeds has over 1,500 travel professionals in more than 120 cities across over 50 countries, selling to more 190 destination countries worldwide. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the company lost 95 per cent of its online traffic and found that it had to make drastic changes.
In a bid to save money and adapt quickly to the changing needs of its business-to-business users, WebBeds, which was already a customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), decided to use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances following advice from AWS.
Mohammed Malik, chief information officer at WebBeds said: “There is a large consensus of industry experts who agree that the travel industry was one of the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with cost management being a key for survival.”
Gabriel Perez Salazar, Engineering Director, WebBeds added: “We needed to reduce our spending, so we went all in on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. We had the same discount as with Reserved Instances but with zero cash out.”
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances is a purchasing option which allows companies to make use of unused Amazon EC2 capacity. This enabled WebBeds to make more savings than if they were using Reserved Instances and pay-as-you-go pricing. Using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances allowed the company to only consume what it needed.
WebBeds also explored AWS Graviton instances in Amazon EC2. This has an ARM-based architecture, enabling the best price performance. Using the two together, WebBeds saved significantly on costs while improving its ability to scale up and down with the unpredictable nature of the travel industry, increasing its sustainability.
Using AWS Graviton2 processors, WebBeds reduced costs by 55 per cent on its Windows-based instances and 64 per cent on its Linux-based instances and also experienced a 40 per cent improvement in CPU performance.
Salazar said: “If we have a lower cost per search, it means that we are wasting less energy to process a request using AWS Graviton2 processors." This reduction in energy has improved sustainability for WebBeds.
As of August 2022, WebBeds is the top user of Spot Instances and AWS Graviton instances in the Iberian Peninsula and the company is using these services to drive infrastructure in a sustainable way. Salazar added: “The AWS team is working alongside us all the time, sharing new services and facilitating cost savings in different places."
