Machine Right-sizing Cost Report: CloudChomp

Cloudchomp has now been acquired by VMWare.

The goal was to build a recommendation system that would suggest EC2 instances based on the CPU and memory usage of on-premise servers.

CloudChomp automates the analysis of infrastructure usage to facilitate migration decisions to AWS. Its CC Analyzer tool provides detailed cost analysis and expert-level AWS pricing estimates, with a cost optimization module that offers significant savings of 40-60% compared to basic migration strategies, without sacrificing performance.

It was a joint effort of all the team members, and plentiful guidance from my superiors around cost calculations, and machine right-sizing techniques, that we arrived at the solution. I mostly worked on the backend, and data analytics part of the tool, meaning data wrangling was my bread-and-butter. We employed open-source tech like Flask, Python, pandas, numpy, PostgreSQL to craft in-house solutions that would analyze, and calculate instance recommendations.

As it was my first project, it was a great learning experience to hone my technical as well as non-technical skills. I learned non-technical skills such as communication, ownership, leadership, etc. that are crucial for career progression.

As it was my first project, and me being just a beginner in 2017, I would do a couple of things differently if I were to do the project again.

- Understanding the customer pain points with a plethora of communications.

- Avoid creating perfect solutions, rather than creating an MVP so that clients can provide feedback.

- Asking more on how I can improve my work with seniors, and supervisors.