Druva Controls Costs with Highly Secure Scaling Strategy on AWS

Druva is a cloud-based data protection company with 4,000 customers in 20 countries. To support its expanding global customer base, Druva containerized its architecture and adopted low-cost Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Druva began its containerization journey in 2018 to dynamically scale its services and greatly reduce single points of failure. As its volume of microservices grew, the company began evaluating container orchestration services, both cloud-based and open-source, to ease the administrative burden on its operations team.

Most of Druva’s customers are Fortune 500 enterprises, such as big pharma corporations, U.S. government entities, or public agencies. Druva chose to use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for its global availability and compliance with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). Compliance with FedRAMP—as well as SOC 2, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)—is a vital first step in obtaining and retaining high-profile customers.

“Our customers recognize AWS compliance and security certifications, which makes our lives much easier because we don’t need to pursue time-consuming, costly third-party assessments,” says Kiran Chitnis, senior director of cloud operations at Druva.

Containers have proven an efficient means for scaling the enterprise. As of 2021, Druva is active in 18 AWS Regions including AWS GovCloud (US), up from 11 regions when it started containerizing in 2018. Expanding its footprint and activating new AWS Regions has allowed Druva to onboard new customers in countries such as South Africa and Sweden while satisfying data residency and latency requirements. Low latency is critical for Druva’s customers when backing up large volumes of high-value data.

Druva’s customers can also maintain a lower recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) thanks to the scalability offered with containers. Previously, the rerouting of a customer’s backup job to an AWS Region at maximum server capacity would go into a queue, thus driving up the RPO indefinitely until more resources were available. Now, with containerization, Druva will seldom face a scenario where a customer’s backup job has to wait because its infrastructure is saturated. “With automation now in place, we have seamless elasticity to grow and the orchestration capabilities to dynamically spin up resources in real time for varying workloads,” says Chitnis.

As Druva expanded, it looked at ways to control operations costs, particularly in relation to labor. Before implementing containers, Druva was increasing its operations team headcount by 20–25 percent each year. Its entire infrastructure was static, so for each change in customer behavior, engineers had to manually adjust resources and monitor fleet performance.

In the first three years after containerizing, Druva nearly quadrupled the amount of data under management from 45 PB to 175 PB. But by leveraging out-of-the-box functionality of Amazon ECS, the business only increased its operations headcount by two during this period.

Costs have also decreased from using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances in conjunction with Amazon ECS. Before 2020, the company relied on a mix of up to 80 percent Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, 10 percent On-Demand Instances, and very few Spot Instances.

The balance has now shifted so that Spot Instances handle most workloads, with Reserved Instances deployed when Spot Instances become unavailable. The company’s On-Demand Amazon EC2 instance usage has dropped to zero. As of 2021, Druva projects 20–25 percent monthly savings on its Amazon EC2 monthly computing bill. Critically, the shift hasn’t affected system uptime, which maintains 99.5 percent availability for over 10 years on AWS.

Druva developed an API-based tool to automate the orchestration of Spot Instances, and it has benefited from native integrations among AWS services, including Amazon ECS. “The speed at which we can launch instances and the flexibility of the overall compute infrastructure on AWS are astounding,” Chitnis shares. “AWS manages the control plane for Amazon ECS and we only manage the data workloads and configuration. This gave us substantial leverage to speed up our deployment time.”

The Druva platform’s high degree of automation allows the company’s operations team to build their skill sets in cloud economics instead of simply performing maintenance tasks. They can also more effectively identify and remove bottlenecks related to capacity restraints to further optimize their cloud architecture.

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/ec2/spot