Case Study: Sophos saves 30%-40% on Apache Kafka costs with Aiven Bring Your Own Cloud on AWS
Key results
The challenge
Sophos Central, the SaaS platform behind Sophos's cybersecurity offering, relies on Apache Kafka to ingest and process streaming threat data in real time. Its Kafka pipelines had grown to 50 terabytes of data per region every day, increasing 5% per month, across nine AWS regions. Sophos wanted to reduce spend on this mission-critical service without giving up the benefits of a managed service.
The solution
Sophos adopted Aiven's Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model for Aiven for Apache Kafka on AWS, keeping the managed-service benefits while running the deployment in its own AWS account to take advantage of AWS compute savings plans and gain granular control over networking.
“Aiven's BYOC on AWS solution has saved us between 30% and 40% of our total spend on the mission-critical Aiven for Kafka service.”
BCBrian CampbellSenior Director Software Engineering, Sophos
The results, in context
Sophos reported saving between 30% and 40% of its total spend on the Aiven for Apache Kafka service. It migrated all 79 Kafka clusters using BYOC across the nine AWS regions with zero downtime and zero data loss. Sophos also noted that self-managing the Kafka clusters would have required an additional team of five to six people on top of its 30-person data platform team.