How Cloudnexa Helped Avolio Optimize Their AWS Architecture and Save 90% Time Spent Researching Solutions

The Client

Avolio by Swapcard

Industry

Event Management

Location

Atlanta, GA and Paris, France

Swapcard is an in-person and virtual events platform that combines everything needed for successful event management in one place. Swapcard acquired Avolio in 2021. Bryan Philips is the Director of Registration Product for Swapcard.

The Challenges

Shoring up AWS best practices

Avolio was on the verge of being acquired by Swapcard. The small company of 10 people would suddenly be a company of over 200 with international reach. Avolio needed an AWS partner to help the company:

Facilitate resource growth
Add a European data center and ensure GDPR compliance
Set up autoscaling
Help Avolio/Swapcard ensure SOC compliance at the European data center
Optimize their use of AWS to reduce unnecessary costs

Avolio began searching for a partner who could help them understand and implement AWS architecture best practices and then provide an ongoing managed solution to ensure future scalability. That search led them to Cloudnexa.

“We started with a really simple infrastructure that we’d gone from hosting our own servers to the Cloud on our own. There were things that we were doing that no longer made sense in a Cloud environment. We wanted a partner whose knowledge could help us improve, to offer a better service and lower our costs.”

Solution

A managed solution to relieve operational burden

Cloudnexa kicked off the relationship with a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR). This review identifies risks and helps Avolio generate specific action items to optimize workloads and uncover opportunities as they scale.

Then Cloudnexa began executing on improvements as part of their ongoing AWS Managed Solution, which includes fully managed cloud architect manager, security, DevOps, and support. As part of the solution, Cloudnexa helped Avolio autoscale their complicated multi-instance SaaS application and remove unused components to optimize AWS costs.

And, when Avolio was acquired by Swapcard, having Cloudnexa in place to manage the AWS infrastructure made the merger easier: they didn’t have to worry about the backend infrastructure of their products, because it was already managed by Cloudnexa.

Once the merger was completed, Cloudnexa helped expand the AWS infrastructure and ensure that it complied with GDPR.

“We were able to really take advantage of Cloudnexa’s broad knowledge of AWS to do only what we needed to, instead of throwing everything at the application to see what worked best.”

Results

A valuable partnership and over 90% research time saved

Working with Cloudnexa saves Avolio (now part of Swapcard) over 10 hours of AWS infrastructure management each month.

They’ve cut the amount of time they need to spend researching solutions by over 90%, from hours spent comparing use cases down to a few conversations with their Cloudnexa solutions architect, who performs the research for them.

Avolio/Swapcard’s overall AWS costs have gone up with their expansion, but Cloudnexa’s cost optimizations have allowed them to eliminate unnecessary spending and cut out unused resources. As their company continues to grow, Cloudnexa helps them support more infrastructure more efficiently, without any cost increases to their Managed Cloud Solution.

“When you are able to have a partner like Cloudnexa at a similar price as a single internal resource would cost, it's an easy decision.”