EE Increases Efficiency with CloudHealth

EE is the UK's largest 4G network provider. It is imperative that the team ensures sufficient infrastructure capacity so that EE is able to support traffic during normal periods, as well as during peak traffic events such as device launches and flash sales. A large part of the IT team’s job depends on “being efficient and effective with our AWS infrastructure.”

EE faces challenges with cloud

Efficiency is key to understanding why EE uses CloudHealth; the company continuously seeks out areas where cloud optimization can be streamlined.

“We began to identify inefficiencies in how the company was utilizing EC2 and RDS instances, from a cost, deployment, and time perspective,” says Tyrone Forbes, Senior Capacity Performance Manager. “We decided to purchase a cloud service management solution in the hopes that manual calculations would no longer be necessary. The burden of manipulating Reserved Instances (RIs) across multiple environments, accounts, and availability zones became time-consuming.”

Finding a solution

EE uses CloudHealth to maximize return on investments. This is done by identifying underutilized instances, removing the tedium of purchasing them, and keeping cost and usage in check while the company scales.

The team has also taken full advantage of the platform’s governance capabilities, creating Perspectives, and setting policies around things like elastic IPs. Certain actions trigger an automated alert, allowing Tyrone to maintain visibility with minimal effort.

"CloudHealth alerts me when an account exceeds a prescribed threshold. I've also introduced additional policies, for example, if an EBS volume has been orphaned for a certain amount of time, I need to know about it."

— Tyrone Forbes

Sr. Capacity and Performance Manager, EE

“We have a large number of AWS accounts, so it’s useful to set thresholds for cost and general usage,” he says. “That way, CloudHealth alerts me when an account exceeds a prescribed threshold. I’ve also introduced additional policies. For example, if an EBS volume has been orphaned for a certain amount of time, I need to know about it.”

The results

With CloudHealth reporting, manual data calculations are a thing of the past. “I’d say we save at least a week of manpower every six months, using CloudHealth to analyze performance and usage instead of doing it ourselves,” says Tyrone. 

"CloudHealth saves us about half a day of work per week automating RI management."

— Tyrone Forbes

Sr. Capacity and Performance Manager, EE