A global leader in AI-powered customer experience and workforce engagement solutions, has integrated Volumez into its internal Cloud Portal, empowering over 7,000 developers to easily provision their application development environments. By incorporating Volumez’ high-performance block services, our client introduced a premium tier specifically designed for demanding database workloads, further enhancing the development experience and driving cost efficiencies for high-end customer deployments.
Cloud Portal: Empowering developers with seamless provisioning
The internal Cloud Portal is the central hub for our client’s extensive developer community, streamlining the provisioning of development environments across multiple cloud platforms. The Cloud Portal enables developers to rapidly deploy and test new features, ensuring quicker iterations and improved time to market for our client’s suite of enterprise software solutions.
However, the increasing complexity of development requirements, particularly for high-performance databases, created challenges in delivering consistent storage performance without escalating costs. To address these needs, our client turned to Volumez, integrating its advanced block storage services into the Cloud Portal to provide a robust, scalable storage option for developers.
Volumez: High-performance block storage services for demanding database workloads
Volumez is a cutting-edge block storage composition service designed to meet the needs of data-intensive applications, making it an ideal fit for our client’s development environments. Volumez combines guaranteed high performance with enterprise-grade data services, delivering a seamless storage experience for high-end databases and applications that require low latency and high throughput.
The integration of Volumez into the Cloud Portal enables developers to access a new high-performance storage tier. This tier is specifically optimized for databases, offering sub-millisecond latency and the ability to handle the demanding I/O requirements of complex development workloads. By leveraging Volumez, our client’s developers can now build and test high-performance applications without being constrained by traditional cloud storage limitations.
The Challenge: Delivering high performance and reducing costs
One of the key challenges faced by our client is providing a high-performance storage solution for their developers while maintaining cost efficiency. With thousands of developers using the Cloud Portal daily to spin up environments, the demand for IOPS and low-latency storage for database workloads grew significantly. Traditional cloud storage solutions like Amazon EBS often struggled to meet these performance requirements at an acceptable cost, especially for high-end databases used in complex test environments.
Additionally, as our client looked to extend these high-performance solutions into production for their enterprise customers, reducing the total cost of ownership and ensuring consistent performance across environments became a critical focus.
The Solution: Volumez provides high performance with cost efficiency
Volumez addresses these challenges by using standard EC2 instances combined with local NVMe storage to create a high-performance, cost-effective storage solution. In the Cloud Portal, developers can now select the Volumez high-performance tier, which delivers predictable performance and low latency, even for the most demanding database workloads.
Volumez’ innovative controller-less architecture establishes direct Linux data paths, bypassing typical storage bottlenecks and reducing latency. This approach enables the developers to meet their IOPS and throughput requirements without relying on expensive, performance-tier EBS volumes. By leveraging EC2 instances (e.g., i4i xlarge) as both application and media nodes, Volumez optimizes AWS resource usage, significantly lowering storage costs.
Figure 1: Cloud Portal and Volumez integration.
Figure 2: Deployed Volumez environment through the Cloud Portal.
Figure 3: High-level architecture.
Volumez’ integration also aligns with our client’s broader strategy of pursuing further cost reductions in production environments. By offering a high-performance storage tier during the development phase, our client can identify and implement the most efficient storage configurations for high-end customer systems, ultimately reducing the cost and complexity of production deployments.
Achieving consistent performance and cost savings
Since integrating Volumez into its Cloud Portal, our client has seen a substantial improvement in storage performance and developer productivity. The high-performance tier enables developers to work with large datasets and complex database environments seamlessly, accelerating testing and feature development. The figure below shows the consistent IOPS performance achieved across the high-performance tier, highlighting the stabilization of latency and throughput for intensive workloads.
Figure 4: Provisioned Volumez in the Cloud Portal with performance characteristics.
The use of Volumez has also led to significant cost savings, allowing our client to optimize their storage spend while meeting the performance needs of their development and production environments. The predictable, high-speed storage provided by Volumez reduces reliance on costly Amazon EBS volumes, making it a key enabler of our client’s ongoing cost optimization strategy.
Conclusion
The Volumez integration into the internal Cloud Portal has transformed the developer experience, providing a reliable, high-performance storage solution for complex database workloads. By offering a dedicated high-performance tier, our client not only met the demanding requirements of their 7,000-strong developer community, but also lay the groundwork for cost-efficient, high-performance production systems for their enterprise customers.
The collaboration with Volumez allows our client to deliver consistent, predictable storage performance while reducing costs, empowering developers to build and test cutting-edge applications effectively. With Volumez as part of our client’s cloud strategy, they are poised to continue driving innovation and efficiency in their development and production environments.