Valent’s small IT team achieves big savings with CloudFix

CloudFix is a no-brainer. Any AWS users who are struggling with ballooning costs – CloudFix is the way to go.

How a sustainable agriculture company automated its way to more time and lower costs

Headquartered in San Ramon, California, Valent develops and markets agricultural products that integrate biorational, botanical, and traditional chemistry approaches. Its mission is bold: advance sustainable agriculture, protect crops, enhance crop yields, improve food quality, beautify the environment, and safeguard public health.

With worldwide operations and customers, and little on-site infrastructure, moving to AWS was an easy choice for Valent. A multi-year digital transformation journey resulted in more than 90% of the company’s infrastructure running on the cloud, but as adoption grew, so did costs. Valent needed a way to streamline and automate AWS cost optimization so its slim IT team could focus on delivering business value. That’s when they found CloudFix.

The benefits of AWS keep growing – but so does the cost

The Valent team chose AWS for its breadth of offerings, speed to implementation, and resources to support its R&D team. “Moving away from hardware infrastructure to AWS lets us be much more agile,” said Mike Cortez, Valent’s lead IT infrastructure architect. “It’s central to our digital transformation initiative and important to our research team, too. AWS not only supports our IT objectives, its genetics layers play a key role in R&D for our products.”

AWS is central to our digital transformation initiative and important to our research team, too. It not only supports our IT objectives, its genetics layers play a key role in R&D for our products.

For Valent, the benefits of AWS kept growing – but so did the price. “We learned quickly that the ‘lift and shift’ model was not very cost effective,” Cortez continued. “It’s not like-kind to like-kind and doesn’t take into account differences in sizing. We ended up with a ton of wasted space but couldn’t reduce our volumes, so our costs were out of control.”

Cortez and his team hired an AWS managed service provider to help with cost optimization, but while the third-party helped identify savings opportunities, it was up to Valent to put them into practice. Cortez shared, “We could use their tools to review things like right-sizing and changing volume types, but it was all manual. It took a tremendous amount of time and energy to implement them. It just wasn’t sustainable, especially for our small team.”

Valent saves time and money with CloudFix’s automated fixes

Cortez learned about CloudFix from his AWS rep, and was immediately drawn to the ability to automate AWS-recommended fixes. The initial CloudFix savings assessment found almost $30,000 in savings by switching from gp2 to gp3 alone. “I wish I had CloudFix sooner!” Cortez said. “We were manually moving from gp2 to gp3, but this is 1000% easier and faster.” With the work the team had completed prior to CloudFix, plus impact of the CloudFix fix, Valent now saves approximately $40,000 per month on Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes alone.

Implementing CloudFix was fast and easy as well. According to Cortez, “CloudFix and our managed service provider came together and deployed it seamlessly. There were no bumps that weren’t ironed out in the first 30 minutes. It’s very straightforward to set up and use.”

AWS is a monster; I can’t keep up with all the advisories. Being able to automatically implement the latest recommendations is game-changing.

The Valent team particularly appreciates the automated nature of CloudFix. “We run a very lean environment and I have to be able to automate as much as I can,” Cortez commented. “AWS is a monster; I can’t keep up with all the advisories. Being able to automatically implement the latest recommendations is game-changing.”

Best of all: CloudFix takes AWS cost optimization off of Cortez’s plate so he can work on business-critical initiatives. “Time is very valuable. To be able to save that much time so I can focus on more value-added work is a huge thing, above and beyond the dollar figure. That time back is very much appreciated,” he added.

“It’s a no-brainer”: Valent doubles down on AWS with its savings from CloudFix

What’s next for Valent, AWS, and CloudFix? Cortez plans to optimize additional Amazon EBS volumes and to keep using his favorite feature – the “always fix” button – to save more time than ever. The team also intends to reinvest the time and savings delivered by CloudFix into expanding further into AWS. Cortez concluded, “CloudFix is a no-brainer. Any AWS users who are struggling with ballooning costs – CloudFix is the way to go.”

To be able to save that much time so I can focus on more value-added work is a huge thing, above and beyond the dollar figure.