Rightsizing and Optimizing Infrastructure to Cut $1 Million in Costs with GE Vernova

GE Vernova is accelerating the path to more reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy while helping its customers to power economies and deliver the electricity that is vital to health, safety, security, and improved quality of life. GE Vernova’s technology helps to generate approximately 30 percent of the world’s electricity, supporting customers through the energy transition. Its parent company, General Electric, had been using AWS since 2012. As GE Vernova prepared to become an independent company sometime in early 2024, the database team looked at areas for cost savings and improvements. “We implemented reporting for all our individual accounts, but we needed to pull it all together and continually refactor it so that it was accurate,” says Neil Leslie, database operations leader for GE Vernova. “It’s all about having good vision and understanding the data so that you can act on it.”

To monitor individual accounts, GE Vernova uses AWS Trusted Advisor, which provides recommendations that help organizations to follow AWS best practices. The database team gains visibility into these findings through Amazon CloudWatch, which collects and visualizes near-real-time logs, metrics, and event data in automated dashboards to streamline infrastructure and application maintenance. Working closely alongside AWS technical account managers, specialists, and operational support teams, GE Vernova defined specific work streams across multiple accounts where it could save significant costs. “At the start of the project, AWS provided a huge amount of support for getting the data required and recommending best practices for resizing, which stopped us from making mistakes,” says Leslie. “I haven’t seen that all-encompassing service from a vendor for a long time. I know AWS is customer-oriented, but still, this was very impressive and one of the reasons for the project’s success.”

Initially, GE Vernova focused on low-risk areas for immediate cost savings. The team cut $64,000 by removing manual snapshots and automating the process through AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service. Next, the team automated the shutdown of about 80 percent of its nonproduction Amazon RDS instances when not in use, configuring them using AWS Instance Scheduler, which configures start and stop schedules for Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances to manage costs. Using AWS Instance Scheduler, GE Vernova saves about $460,000 yearly.

Using data from AWS Trusted Advisor and Amazon CloudWatch, the team identified instances that had been idle for long periods, and it automated communications to the associated application teams to confirm that it was OK to decommission them. The initial implementation saved about $100,000 and continues to generate small monthly savings.

In late 2022, GE Vernova focused on resizing initiatives, using data from Amazon RDS Performance Insights, which analyzes and tunes Amazon RDS database performance, along with Amazon CloudWatch and internal database tools. Seeking to save on costs and modernize its compute infrastructure, the team saved $504,000 by downsizing 50 instances to smaller instance types. It also migrated 128 instances to the second generation of AWS Graviton processors, a family of processors designed to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads running on Amazon EC2. “With the number of instances we’ve migrated, it’s been quite striking that we haven’t had significant performance issues,” says Leslie. “We see a very reliable processor that helps us downsize capacity while gaining a performance boost.” In 2023, the team converted an additional 246 instances to AWS Graviton2 processors for another $100,000 worth of savings in 3 months. The team projects additional savings of $200,000 per year by implementing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, which provide a discount of up to 72 percent compared with Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing and provide a capacity reservation when used in a specific Availability Zone.

In addition to cost-saving measures in its database applications, GE Vernova saves $18,000 per month by optimizing storage through its use of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering cutting-edge scalability, data availability, security, and performance. The company configured Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies to define when to archive objects by migrating them to Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes, which provide long-term, secure, durable storage classes for data archiving at the lowest cost and milliseconds access.

In less than a year, GE Vernova met its million-dollar target. By eveloping automations and applying AWS best practices to its infrastructure, the team modernized its traditional approach to database management and is applying new skills to future solutions. Additionally, the team is sharing its learnings across all GE Vernova so that other teams can benefit from best practices in cost cutting and modernization.

“Using AWS helps us put the entire business on a better path,” says Leslie. “We optimize and deliver cutting-edge solutions that help GE Vernova meet its business goals to continue to electrify and decarbonize the world. That’s the end game.”