How i helped Snap Homework App save $5000/month in storage cost
Snap Homework is mobile app used by school teachers to send communication and classroom updates to students (there are lot more features), the updates/communication usually includes text, audio, video or images. Your text goes into database but for audio, video and images you need storage solution which is scalable, faster and reliable.
We wanted it FAST…
When we started evaluating which solution to use, the parameters for choice were 1) Fast 2) Scalable 3) Reliable 4) Cost. However, we wanted our application to be fast and that was main driver of selection of storage service solution and basis that we zeroed on to AWS S3 Bucket with Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration.
AWS has amazing services be it VMs, Storage but they expensive as much as 30–40% over GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Anyways, as we wanted our users to experience blazing fast uploads and downloads, we went ahead with AWS. It worked great as speed went up, so was the bill. In fact at one point of time, Snap Homework was paying $10,000 -$15,000/month just on storage/S3 bucket to AWS.
The Balancing Act…
After a year or so, with AWS bill skyrocketing and Snap Homework application itself free to school teachers/schools, we decide it’s time we do some balancing act and get good combination of speed and cost. I spoke to GCP India team and they walked us through their AWS S3 equivalent Google Cloud Storage. It was equally fast, with at least 40% reduced monthly bills.
So if you looking assets storage service which fast, scalable and cost effective. I highly recommend Google Cloud Storage.