By “rightsizing” instance types to workload requirements or turning off underutilised resources, the bank promised back in February that 2022 would be a year in which it tried to keep its cloud costs under control.
Later, CTO Steve Day said on the company had saved money by turning off developer environments during the holidays and used more spot instances and EC2 instances with Arm processors.
More information about the savings has now been made public via an AWS case study.
According to estimates, these “save around a million dollars a year.” What other sources contribute to the “million dollars a month” statement is unclear.
NAB has expanded usage “from two percent in 2019 to over 17 percent in 2022” for spot instances.
The AWS case study reports that in 2022, “around 26% of non-production workloads and an increasing number of important applications, such as NAB’s trading platform, ran on spot instances.”
The bank reportedly “raised its use of [Arm-based] AWS Graviton processors by 30% per year.”
It now uses Graviton-powered EC2 instances to execute workloads and “big applications” like the NAB data hub, which is the bank’s data lake.
