Advertising Firm Cuts AWS Spend 30% with Rightsizing & Auto Scaling
National Advertising Agency
Challenge
A national advertising agency running campaign analytics, ad-serving infrastructure, and creative asset processing on AWS was paying for peak capacity around the clock. Oversized instances sat idle during off-hours, and traffic-driven workloads had no scaling strategy — the team simply provisioned for worst-case load and left it running. The result was a monthly bill growing faster than revenue.
Solution
Performed a comprehensive utilization audit across the compute fleet and identified that most instances were significantly over-provisioned relative to actual CPU and memory usage. Rightsized instances to match real workload demands, then designed and implemented auto scaling policies tied to campaign traffic patterns and processing queues. Introduced scheduled scaling for predictable daily and weekly cycles, and target tracking policies for unpredictable spikes during campaign launches.
Results
- 30% reduction in annual AWS spend
- Compute costs aligned to actual demand instead of peak capacity
- Auto scaling handles campaign launch traffic spikes automatically
- Scheduled scaling eliminates overnight and weekend waste
- Zero degradation to ad-serving latency or analytics throughput