Authors: FutureLens
Originally published on Towards AI.
How a Spring Boot Optimization Saved Our Startup $30,000 Per Year
In the bustling world of tech startups, every penny counts. For us at FutureLens, our AWS bill was a constant reminder that our infrastructure costs were spiraling out of control. Last month, it hit $7,400, following $6,900 and $6,200 in the preceding months. The upward trend was alarming, especially since it wasn’t tied to an increase in user activity. What went wrong?
After a deep dive into our systems, we pinpointed the issue: inefficiencies inherent in Spring Boot’s default settings. Here’s how we tackled these challenges and saw our cloud expenses plummet.
Identifying the Culprit
Spring Boot is a fantastic framework, but its out-of-the-box settings can sometimes lead to inefficiencies in production environments. We discovered that our default HikariCP connection pool settings were suboptimal, leading to excessive CPU usage. By fine-tuning these settings, we immediately saw a drop in CPU consumption.
Another critical discovery was an expensive session validation query that was being executed redundantly on every authenticated request. By implementing Redis caching, we eliminated this unnecessary load, enhancing performance significantly.
Streamlining Database Operations
Our database, powered by PostgreSQL, was another area ripe for optimization. We observed that our system was frequently performing costly sequential scans due to missing composite indexes. By adding these indexes, we reduced the load on our database and improved query performance.
Optimizing Resource Allocation
Our AWS setup relied heavily on ECS Fargate tasks. Initially, these tasks were oversized, consuming more resources than necessary. By resizing them based on actual usage patterns, we achieved a substantial reduction in our AWS bill. This change, combined with the other optimizations, brought our monthly cloud spending down from $7,400 to approximately $3,130.
In total, these optimizations are saving our startup between $30,000 and $35,000 annually, a significant boon for our bottom line.
For a deeper dive into our optimization journey, you can read the full blog Here.
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