Networx develep case study

How Networx Achieved 30% Cost Reduction and Accelerated Growth Through Cloud Excellence

Introduction

Networx is a leading platform that connects homeowners with trusted local contractors across the United States. Since 2004, the company has helped millions of homeowners find professionals for home improvement projects, while providing contractors with high-quality, “ready-to-buy” leads and tools to grow their businesses.

As user demand grew and Networx expanded its contractor network, the company needed a robust, scalable, and secure infrastructure to maintain performance, reduce costs, and ensure business continuity. To meet these challenges, Networx partnered with Develeap to modernize its AWS cloud environment, adopt DevOps best practices, and create a foundation for sustainable growth.

Develeap helped Networx cut its AWS cloud spend by 30% while transforming its platform into a more performant, resilient, highly available, and cost-optimized environment. By standardizing processes all the way from development to production through a robust CI/CD pipelines, and leveraging native AWS services for autoscaling and failover, Networx now scales seamlessly to meet peak demand, pinpoints performance bottlenecks in real time, and delivers an even more reliable experience to homeowners and contractors alike.

The Challenge

To support its rapid expansion and maintain a seamless user experience, Networx needed to overcome several key challenges.

• The platform needed to scale efficiently to handle increasing volumes of contractor activity and homeowner leads, all while maintaining high performance. 
• Ensuring reliable uptime and responsiveness was critical, especially with contractors depending on real-time notifications to win jobs across time zones. 
• Protecting user data and meeting industry security standards became increasingly important. 
• Streamline infrastructure management and deployment processes to improve operational efficiency and development velocity. 
• Cost optimization was essential to maintain financial sustainability as usage grew. 
• To safeguard business continuity, Networx required a resilient architecture capable of withstanding failures and enabling rapid disaster recovery. 

Together, these challenges called for a comprehensive DevOps-driven solution grounded in cloud best practices.

The Solution

Develeap delivered a tailor-made solution based on AWS best practices and the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The implementation focused on performance, scalability, security, and resilience, all while fostering a strong DevSecOps culture within Networx’s development and operations teams.

Scalable AWS Cloud Infrastructure
Develeap designed and deployed a flexible and scalable AWS cloud infrastructure to support Networx’s platform. Our auto-scaling implementation enabled Networx’s infrastructure to dynamically handle traffic spikes without performance degradation. The multi-server load balancing architecture distributed traffic efficiently, supporting Networx’s ability to serve more concurrent users during peak demand periods. Application response times improved through optimized resource allocation and caching strategies, directly enhancing user experience and customer satisfaction.

Security Best Practices
Develeap implemented a robust set of security measures to protect user data and ensure compliance with industry standards. This included AWS Secrets Manager for secure credential management, utilizing AWS IAM for fine-grained access control, AWS GuardDuty for threat detection, AWS CloudTrail for auditing, and AWS Config for compliance monitoring.

The deployment of AWS WAF with custom rule sets blocked 99.7% of malicious traffic attempts, including SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks.

Implementation of client VPN solutions provided secure, encrypted access for development and operations team members, replacing insecure direct access methods.

DevSecOps Practices and Culture
In addition to standard security best practices, we adopted a DevSecOps culture to integrate security into the development lifecycle, promoting faster and more secure development cycles. This approach involved implementing CI/CD pipelines and automations, creating standardized and unified processes throughout the whole system life cycles, reducing the room for human errors, and uncoordination, ensuring that code changes were tested, validated, and deployed efficiently with embedded security checks to maintain high standards throughout the development process.

Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Develeap transformed Networx’s manually managed infrastructure to infrastructure as code using Terraform and Terragrunt, allowing us to automate the creation and management of cloud resources efficiently. Terraform facilitated state management and visibility, enabling us to detect drifts, maintain a consistent and reliable infrastructure setup that could be quickly adjusted for growth or changes in business needs.

Zero-Downtime Deployments and Developer Velocity
The implementation of traffic distribution and automated CI/CD pipelines achieved true zero-downtime deployments, eliminating the previous maintenance windows that occurred weekly. This transformation reduced time-to-market for new features significantly, enabling Networx to deploy code changes from development to production in under 20 minutes. The migration of development environments to EKS enhanced developer productivity, providing production-like environments with integrated debugging and profiling tools that accelerated troubleshooting and feature development.

Operational Excellence and Visibility
The implementation of centralized logging with Loki and Grafana provided comprehensive system visibility, reducing troubleshooting time and enabling data-driven decision making. Our standardized CI/CD processes eliminated manual deployment errors, reducing production incidents and establishing consistent, repeatable procedures across all environments. The adoption of DevOps practices fostered cross-team collaboration, reducing communication overhead and accelerating project delivery timelines.

Cost Optimization:
When Networx’s CTO prioritized cost reduction as a key strategic initiative, he challenged Develeap to maximize cloud spend optimization without compromising performance or reliability. Through comprehensive analysis and strategic implementation of AWS cost optimization practices, we delivered over 30% reduction in monthly cloud spend.

This achievement was made possible by our deep understanding of Networx’s infrastructure architecture, operational requirements, and business objectives. Our thorough environment assessment enabled us to identify high-impact optimization opportunities and prioritize initiatives that would deliver maximum cost savings while supporting business growth. The following strategic actions demonstrate how targeted expertise and systematic approach drove measurable financial results:

• Rightsizing Instances: We conducted a comprehensive performance analysis to identify over-provisioned instances across all environments. Through detailed monitoring of CPU utilization, memory consumption, and network throughput patterns, we rightsized instances to match actual workload requirements. 
• Stale Resources: Leveraging Develeap’s Scout FinOps capabilities, we’ve identified stale resources that can be deleted, such as unattached EBS volumes and old database snapshots.
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• Compute Savings: Through deep analysis of multi-account compute usage patterns and forecasting models, we strategically implemented a 1-year Compute Savings Plan with partial upfront payment. This approach considered planned infrastructure optimizations and projected workload growth, securing up to 30% discount on compute costs compared to on-demand pricing. 
• Reserved Instances: After identifying the production RDS database as the highest cost-consuming service, we conducted a utilization analysis confirming consistent operation with stable performance requirements. We implemented a 1-year Reserved Instance plan with partial upfront payment, achieving A39% cost reduction compared to on-demand pricing.
   
• Automated Cost Governance: We established proactive cost management through automated policies and lifecycle management:

1. ECR Image Lifecycle: Implemented automated deletion policies removing images older than 30 days for development repositories and 120 days for production, reducing registry storage costs.
2. S3 Lifecycle Policies: Configured tiered storage transitions tailored to each bucket’s access patterns, reducing storage costs while maintaining data accessibility requirements. 

Infrastructure Resilience and Availability
We architected a highly available, multi-AZ EKS cluster that eliminated single points of failure and achieved 99.9% uptime. The implementation of multi-AZ RDS with automated daily snapshots and cross-region backup replication established comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities, reducing potential data loss and recovery time from hours to minutes. Our advanced monitoring solution, using self-managed monitoring tools, along with CloudWatch metrics and custom alerts, reduced mean time to detection, enabling proactive issue resolution before customer impact.

Results and Business Impact

The partnership between Networx and Develeap delivered transformative results across infrastructure reliability, security, performance, and cost optimization, positioning Networx for accelerated growth in the competitive home improvement market. 

The comprehensive infrastructure transformation delivered by Develeap established Networx as a technologically advanced, operationally efficient organization capable of scaling to meet ambitious growth objectives. Enhancing its system reliability and feature delivery capabilities while reducing cloud cost. Networx now possesses the technical foundation to capture market opportunities while delivering exceptional customer experiences. The combination of enhanced security posture, streamlined operations, and improved developer productivity has positioned Networx with the agility and resilience needed to sustain long-term growth and innovation..

About Develeap

Develeap is an AWS Premier Partner, specializing in DevOps and cloud engineering. With a team of more than 100 expert engineers, Develeap helps organizations accelerate innovation through automation, AI engineering, Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and security-focused cloud architecture.

Working closely with customers like Networx, Develeap delivers tailored solutions following AWS best practices, supporting continuous growth and security. Our partnership with Networx has resulted in streamlined workflows, a rapid response to growing customer requirements, and a steadfast commitment to customer satisfaction.

By choosing AWS, adopting a DevSecOps culture, implementing robust security and cost optimization measures, and focusing on resilience, Networx positioned itself as a leader in the competitive home improvement industry.