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Cloud Management

Learn about Blank Street's hassle-free experience with Usage AI's automated cloud savings platform to re-route excess cloud expenditure to instead fuel new product development and turbo-charge the global expansion of their mission!

Stats

21%

Overall reduction in AWS expenditure

57%

Cost reduction in Redshift spend

48.12%

Reduction in ElastiCache spend

100%

Redshift coverage for comprehensive optimization

150+ Employees | Headquarters: New York, NY | Industry: Coffee Company | Service: AWS Redshift, ElastiCache, RDS, EC2

Company: Leveraging technology to reimagine the coffee scene

Founded in 2020, Blank Street is a specialty coffee chain with over 60 locations across New York City, Boston, and London. It was built on the belief that great rituals have an outsized impact on your life, and their mission is to create daily rituals that enrich your life.

In their mission to turn specialty coffee into a daily ritual, the Brooklyn-based coffee chain started with a goal to invest in the right things - great coffee, great baristas, and frictionless tech - to create a better experience for customers. Blank Street also understood that by leveraging and effectively using technology, it could offer products at an affordable price, improve operational efficiency and offer seamless vendor management.

Situation/Opportunity: Optimize Spending Supporting Further Investment in Innovation & Product Development

Blank Street has an ongoing goal to grow and expand their business over the next 3-5 years. To support this vision, Blank Street needs to take an integrated, data-driven approach across several key areas including, Store Expansion, E-commerce Growth, Customer Loyalty and Brand Awareness.

As Blank Street grew, their cloud infrastructure became more complex. The Technology team needed to optimize AWS spending as they focused on building platform features and supporting growth, leaving an unoptimized, high-performing cloud with unnecessary expenses and missed savings opportunities like Reserved Instances.

Blank Street needed outside cloud expertise to help reduce costs, right-size usage, and maximize cloud ROI.

Blank Street learned of Usage AI's cloud cost optimization expertise, and Usage AI analyzed a sample Blank Street AWS account in read-only mode, identifying significant potential savings.

Impressed by the initial optimization recommendations, Blank Street granted Usage AI full access to implement across their entire cloud footprint.

The goal was to leverage Usage AI's expertise to realize major cost reductions at scale. The initial sample analysis had showcased Usage AI's ability to effectively optimize complex AWS environments.

Solution: Usage AI Analysis and Optimization

Blank Street, an AWS customer from inception, maintains a simple, powerful, and easily maintainable architecture. With Usage AI’s EC2, RDS, Redshift, and OpenSearch optimization tools, Examining how resources are used and optimizing them for better performance and cost savings involves addressing key operational pillars:

Performance: Optimal resource configurations ensure faster response times and improved user experience, potentially boosting revenue.

Budget Control: Precise spending allocation keeps budgets in check, preventing overruns and financial impacts.
Visibility: Clear AWS spending insights enable trend analysis and ROI assessments for specific products and functions.
Scalability: Optimizing for user demand ensures efficient infrastructure scaling, avoiding under-provisioning or over-provisioning.

Results: Clear Cost Efficiencies Achieved and Reallocation of Savings pushed back into the business

Savings Summary: Cost reductions directly contribute to improved profitability. By optimizing their AWS expenses, Blank Street can increase their profit margins, which is particularly crucial for startups and businesses looking to enhance their financial health.

Why Blank Street chose Usage AI:

Adaptable Commitment: Blank Street benefited from a flexible commitment with RI management, streamlining their RIs management effortlessly, ultimately saving them valuable time and resources. guaranteed buy-back RI management, streamlining their RIs management effortlessly, ultimately saving them valuable time and resources.

Efficient Cost Management: Through Usage AI's robust cost optimization features, Blank Street successfully reduced their expenses across Redshift, ElatiCache, RDS, EC2 services. This optimization resulted in a noteworthy 17% reduction in their overall AWS expenditure, delivering substantial cost-efficiency.
Transparent Insights: With Usage AI's user-friendly cost analysis dashboard, Blank Street gained transparent insights into their resource-specific spending patterns. This newfound visibility simplified cost allocation and facilitated effortless expense analysis.

This Blank Street + Usage AI partnership helps leverage best practices and take advantage of known optimization opportunities within their AWS environment while allowing the organization to continue working at the velocity needed to support their growth By working with Usage AI on observability and optimization, Blank Street's infrastructure is in a great position to effectively scale.