About the customer
Industry:Media & Entertainment
Highlights
Cost Optimization 15.9% reduction in Amazon RDS spend
Improved Efficiency 14% improvement in query execution time & overall DB responsiveness
Performance Improvement ~20% improvement, with lower CPU utilization
Challenge
Optimizing Amazon RDS workloads to support cost-efficient scaling
The customer’s Amazon RDS environment was running on older-generation instance types, with database instances supporting transactional processing, analytics queries and time-sensitive data updates. While there were no immediate service issues, internal monitoring and AWS Trusted Advisor insights flagged a suboptimal performance-to-cost ratio on these instances.
To align infrastructure costs with continued growth, the team needed a strategic upgrade path, one that would not disrupt live services or require application refactoring.
Solution
Migration of Amazon RDS to AWS Graviton-based instances
Cloud Kinetics was engaged to migrate the customer’s Amazon RDS workloads (MySQL), including transactional processing, analytics queries and time-sensitive data updates from Intel-based to AWS Graviton-powered instances (db.m7g).
- A dedicated team of AWS-certified engineers, including Database and Infra Architects, Migration Specialists and Performance Engineers, ran a joint discovery and testing phase with the customer’s internal engineering team.
- Native AWS services used included Amazon RDS, Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer.
- A Blue-Green deployment approach ensured zero downtime, with migration validated across staging and production within the customer’s sprint cycle.
Cloud Kinetics delivered more than a database migration by helping the customer unlock better price-performance from AWS and laying the groundwork for broader infrastructure optimization across the cloud estate.
Success Metrics
Zero downtime migration, seamlessly delivered within a sprint cycle Results at a glance
15.9%
reduction in overall Amazon RDS spend
14%
improvement in query execution time & overall DB responsiveness
~20%
performance improvement, with lower CPU utilization on new Graviton instances
The migration was completed within a week, dovetailing with the customer’s Agile sprint cycle, with zero downtime and no application refactoring required. Availability SLAs were maintained throughout, and the customer has since seen improved scaling performance under load without increasing instance size.
Following this migration, the customer has expressed interest in expanding Graviton usage to AWS EC2 workloads, with Cloud Kinetics supporting a broader compute optimization strategy going forward.
