Kubernetes Made Easy: How the Gaming Titan Games24x7 Reduced Its Cloud Costs By 35%

“You might be thinking that signing up for CAST AI is a commitment. But it’s far from that, as there are no upfront payments. You just implement it, see the benefits, and then pay some percentage out of that. This is easily the best model for cost savings. It’s a win-win situation.”

Company size

800+ employees

Industry

Entertainment

Headquarters

Mumbai, India

Cloud services used

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Demand spikes are routine in the world of gaming

A unicorn that achieved a $2.5 billion valuation in 2022, Games24x7 is an India-based multi-game platform that serves games to over 100 million users and is considered one of the fastest-growing online gaming companies in the country.

To deliver a great user experience, the company’s cloud infrastructure needs to be capable of scaling up and down in line with changing demand – and be cost-efficient at the same time.

Whenever an event starts – and that happens every day roughly around the same time – we suddenly see a peak in the traffic on our platform. This may last for anywhere from three to six hours. We were looking to make sure our users had a really world class experience using our platform without incurring a very high cost.
Sanjay Kumar Singh, Head of DevSecOps at Games24x7

Games24x7 was looking to improve its cloud operations and automate spot instance management to drive cost savings, no matter the speed of its business growth. “Cost was the main driver of our decision to try CAST AI. The team worked closely with us and helped us understand what the potential cost savings are. We started seeing benefits in cost reduction and ease of operations right after integrating CAST AI into our FinOps stack,” said Sanjay Kumar Singh.

A 35% reduction in Kubernetes costs

After the initial test run, Games24x7 decided to move forward with the implementation. “The overall experience was great. Especially working with the team, it felt more like working with my own extended team than a partner. This extended to people at all levels, even the CAST AI CPO who’s always just a phone call or email away. That’s another wonderful thing that I personally felt working with CAST AI,” said Sanjay Kumar Singh.

Automation made the entire process of managing Kubernetes costs and resources easier, helping Games24x7 focus on fine-tuning their FinOps model.

I don’t have to think about what kind of cost optimization I need to do, what kind of security best practices or other controls we need to have in place, and things like that. CAST AI is super easy and helpful that way.
Sanjay Kumar Singh, Head of DevSecOps at Games24x7

The annual savings that Games24x7 will achieve after implementing CAST AI is around 35%. However, as the company’s K8s footprint grows, the potential for savings will be even greater. “I believe there is still room for optimization there that we will definitely achieve by working with the CAST AI team. The more and more workloads we run on Kubernetes, the greater the savings we will see. FinOps is a trending topic in the industry and CAST AI has helped us optimize our Kubernetes cost,” said Sanjay Kumar Singh.

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Building FinOps best practices for cost control

Technology leaders at Games24x7 have implemented a number of FinOps best practices to spread cost awareness among their engineering teams and keep cloud costs in check:

Improved cost visibility

As a service owner, you need to know how much infrastructure cost that your service is incurring. The most important step for us was to increase cost visibility. While requesting for an infrastructure, you have visibility into the per day cost. We have also enabled developers to manage non-prod infrastructure in a self-serve way using which they can stop/terminate infra themselves.
Sanjay Kumar Singh, Head of DevSecOps at Games24x7

Detailed historical cost trend

At the service level, we provide cost visibility to service owners with daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly trends. We also help them define unit economics to prevent cloud costs from spinning out of control as our business grows.
Sanjay Kumar Singh, Head of DevSecOps at Games24x7

CAST AI fits well into the company’s FinOps model

Implementing CAST AI made sense in the company’s FinOps journey, even with the migration to Kubernetes still underway. “I thought it might be better to wait for all the migration to finish and then commit to CAST AI. But it turned out that we can carry on the gradual migration to Kubernetes and start seeing benefits with whatever K8s footprint we already had. With a smaller footprint, you can find out the level of cost savings and extrapolate that to make your planning more accurate,” said Sanjay Kumar Singh.

Another benefit was CAST AI’s pricing model, which is optimization-led. The platform charges only for CPUs managed after optimization and easily adjusts to the scale of Kubernetes infrastructure.

CAST AI doesn’t present you with an upfront commitment you have to make based on your infrastructure size. You just pay a percentage based on what you’re actually saving. This model works so much better than a license fee you need to pay no matter what your situation is at the moment.
Sanjay Kumar Singh, Head of DevSecOps at Games24x7

A partner for future business growth

CAST AI was an important addition to the FinOps processes developed by Game24x7, and the company’s growing Kubernetes footprint will only increase its role.

Managing cloud costs is an area where you can’t just say, ‘I’m done.’ The FinOps model is a continuous project. CAST AI came in handy for our Kubernetes workloads, where we saw immense benefits right after the integration. Convincing my stakeholders that implementing CAST AI would drive costs down was easy – who would say no to reducing infrastructure costs?
Sanjay Kumar Singh, Head of DevSecOps at Games24x7