Software Case Study: Can I pay less for a public cloud?

By Marcin Ziolkowski • January 26, 2024

Background Story: Niklas Lundgren is the Chief Technology Officer of Boulebar, a French-originating boutique chain of restaurants that also happens to be a 21st-century cutting-edge cloud-first company. Their Company needed help with optimizing its cloud computing costs and recently met for a chat with Marcin Ziolkowski, CEO of Goddit.io.

 

Marcin: Thanks for taking the time to talk more about what is happening at Boulebar, you guys are fast-moving, and it is fun to see what you are currently working on.

 

Marcin: You’re using the public cloud, right?

Niklas:  That is correct. We have been one of the early adopters of cloud computing and moved all our core reservation and invoicing systems to Microsoft Azure long ago.


We experienced considerable efficiency gains. We have 80 employees in the low season and up to 200 in the summer. I am the only technical person within the organization. I manage it from a software perspective with the help of a handful of consultants.


Marcin: Your software has been running on Azure for years. Why did you reach out to us?

Niklas:  The problem was the cost. Initially, the public cloud cost seemed low, but as the company grew and services expanded, Azure kept rising prices for its services. The charges have recently been increased to unsustainable levels. When we started the cost optimization project, we had an annual rate of $50 000 per year for their service.

 

 

Boule hitting each other on the sand
Image: Boulebar Sverige AB, Sweden 2022

 

Boulebar had an uncontrolled cost problem with their Public Cloud: 

The Goddit Team inspected their Azure setup. Recently Azure released new generations of computing platforms, P1v3 and P2v3. Boulebar’s systems were still on old P1 and P2 1st generation computing resources.

 

To save money, the system needed to be redeployed from scratch with a new configuration. All DNS settings must be updated, SSL certificates uploaded to new application tier platforms, and CI/CD pipelines must be rebuilt. 

 

It was a risky but potentially very rewarding operation. All this was supposed to happen at the beginning of the high season when people started returning to restaurants after being stuck at home for two years due to COVID.

 

Marcin: How did your Azure renovation project go?

Niklas: It was excellent. We had minor hiccups, but you guys solved it pretty much overnight. All our systems have been redeployed on new 3rd generation computing resources. Our Configuration was optimized for cost. We committed to a 3-year long database tier contract, which lowered the price of PostgreSQL by 60%.

 

The result was that our invoices from Azure went down from $50,000 to $10,000 per year. It was an 80% reduction in this cost for us.


Marcin: $ 40k less per year?

Niklas:  Yes, the project paid for itself after a couple of months. You saved us a s***-ton of money.

 

Marcin: You have worked within the software development industry for years. What is your opinion of Goddit?

Niklas: You guys are very pragmatic, in a good sense. You try to make the best possible solution within the customer's budget, even if you earn less money in the short term. I see you prioritize the long-term gains of your customers.

 

Goddit is focused on tech, not sales. Other software companies are more sales oriented. IIts beneficial if the company’s stakeholders are talking with tech people who recommend specific approaches.


Boulebar is efficiently expanding its service offering and opening new venues across the country thanks to its proprietary in-house cloud-native technology stack.

 

High five
Image: Boulebar Sverige AB, Sweden 2022

 

Marcin Ziolkowski  writes about business software development strategies for early-stage companies. He also founded Goddit LLC.  Based in Denver, Colorado, Goddit is a burst tech dev, full-stack software development team providing systems integrations and public cloud AWS and Azure solutions architecture.