How Qubika helped a leading digital platform save $38,800+ per month on cloud and infrastructure costs

At Qubika, we specialize in helping companies optimize their cloud infrastructure, cut unnecessary expenses, and enhance performance. Recently, we worked with a leading digital platform that was overspending on cloud and infrastructure costs due to inefficiencies, redundant services, and under-optimized resource allocation.

Despite multiple previous attempts by other teams, the company struggled to complete critical migrations and achieve cost reductions. Our team stepped in, executed a comprehensive cost-optimization strategy, and successfully saved them over $38,800 per month—all while maintaining performance and reliability.

Third-party services optimization: Akamai to Azure Front Door migration

One of this customer’s core functionalities is providing multimedia content. For that reason, the Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an important component that allows them to serve content all over the world with minimal latency.

One of the most impactful cost-saving initiatives was migrating the CDN from Akamai to Azure Front Door. The company was spending $20K per month on Akamai, and we successfully reduced that cost to $4K per month, achieving $16K monthly savings. Beyond savings, operations were simplified and consolidated into Azure, which serves as the client’s main cloud provider.

Key actions we took

• Service discovery + planning for no downtime
• Execute phased migration
• Leveraged Azure’s built-in capabilities to eliminate extra costs.
• Performance test to compare with previous behavior

Challenge

Other teams had attempted this migration, but due to its complexity, it was never completed. Qubika’s expertise allowed us to successfully execute the migration with zero disruptions, providing immediate cost savings. We did this by taking the following actions:

• Akamai services were tightly coupled, so we needed to coordinate the movement of multiple pieces, such as DNS and CDN components.
• The migration comprised multiple phases to ensure availability during the full process. These phases where:
  • Migrate DNS out of Akamai to CloudFlare
  • Deploy Azure Front Door using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and migrate CDN traffic to Azure Front Door.
  • Migrate DNS to Azure.
  • Gradually move the traffic using geo-based traffic management.

Datadog monitoring & logging optimization

The company was overspending on monitoring and logging, mainly due to excessive data retention and redundant integrations. Before we joined, the company was on its journey to Datadog, where they started using features they really didn’t need and had retention for information that was not used and not required for compliance or audit purposes.

Optimizations implemented:

• Refined retention policies to better match actual operational needs.
• Optimized metric collection to eliminate unnecessary data storage.
• Removed redundant integrations that were no longer required.
• Monthly Savings: $2K+
• Impact: The company maintained full observability while significantly reducing costs.

Azure infrastructure: Regional consolidation

The company was maintaining workloads in multiple regions, leading to unnecessary expenses. A latency and cost assessment revealed that some regions could be safely decommissioned without impacting user experience. Auditing the company’s resources, we noticed that one region wasn’t receiving any traffic, so we proposed removing it to save money. We also discussed the need for multi-region infrastructure with the customer, considering the SLA, and determined that consolidating regions—specifically removing the Australia region—would optimize costs without compromising service quality.

This assessment led to the decommissioning of two regions, resulting in $9.4K in monthly savings. Performance evaluations showed no perceptible impact for most users, while a minor 30ms increase in backend request latency was measured for a subset of customers—an acceptable trade-off given the cost benefits.

Most customer services operate under an SLA that ensures a solid level of availability. However, we are currently working on a multi-AZ strategy to enhance availability in a cost-effective way.

Challenge

Decommissioning cloud regions involves thorough dependency analysis, cross-team coordination, and careful migration planning to avoid disruptions. Despite these complexities, the transition was executed seamlessly.

The process included:

• Stopping traffic routing from Azure Front Door to API Management
• Removing the API Management instance
• Decommissioning App Services
• Eliminating other complementary services

This effort is part of a broader strategy to consolidate resources into a single region, structured in multiple phases:

• Decommissioning selected regions to optimize costs
• Migrating all resources to a central location to simplify infrastructure
• Implementing a multi-AZ strategy to enhance the availability

Azure infrastructure: Auditing

Part of the cost optimization strategy has been reviewing redundant services and exploring legacy services to understand, document, or remove them whenever possible.

The review has been systematic over all the resources on the organization.

Cost optimization requires a deep understanding of the customer business and a deep level of coordination to avoid breaking services. Optimization included many different services described below

Log Analytics Storage Optimization

💰 Monthly Savings: $1.4K per month| Unused Resource Cleanup
💰 Monthly Savings: $2K+ per month | Snowplow Infrastructure Optimization
💰 Monthly Savings: $800 per month | CosmosDB Optimization (From $8,600 to $2,000)
💰 Monthly Savings: $6,600 per month | Data Production Subscription Cleanup
💰 Monthly Savings: $600 per month

Total Cost Savings Breakdown

Optimization	Monthly Savings
Akamai to Azure Front Door Migration	$16,000
Datadog Monitoring & Logging	$2,000+
Region Decommissioning	$9,400
Log Analytics Storage Optimization	$1,400
Unused Resource Cleanup	$2,000+
Snowplow Cluster Optimization	$800
CosmosDB Optimization	$6,600
Data Production Subscription Cleanup	$600
Total Savings	$38,800+ per month

Qubika: Your trusted cloud optimization partner

🔹Proven expertise: We successfully executed cost optimizations where previous teams struggled to deliver results.

🔹 Significant savings: Over $38,800+ in monthly savings, directly improving the company’s bottom line.

🔹 Seamless execution: We ensured a smooth transition without disruptions to business operations.