SYSCO

About the Business

Sysco is the global leader in selling, marketing, and distributing food products to restaurants, healthcare and educational facilities, lodging establishments and other customers who prepare meals away from home. Its family of products also includes equipment and supplies for the foodservice and hospitality industries. With more than 71,000 associates, the company operates 333 distribution facilities worldwide and serves approximately 700,000 customer locations. For fiscal year 2022 that ended July 2, 2022, the company generated sales of more than $68 billion.

The Challenge

With a sprawling AWS cloud infrastructure and new projects regularly being spun up, Sysco wanted to ensure that compute storage costs were being optimized without impacting performance.

The Solution

The proposed solution was twofold; develop a strategy to remove and prevent volumes not attached to an instance and optimize the volume type. 2nd Watch compiled a list of unused Amazon EBS volumes not attached to an instance and used account and tag information to identify resource owners and work with them to remove these volumes that were being paid for, but not being used.

For optimizing the volume types, 2nd watch proposed moving gp2 volumes to the cheaper, gp3 volume type. Volume types can be changed to gp3 manually within the console, but for an organization with tens of thousands of individual volumes, the best solution was an automated, scripted solution to quickly and strategically change the configurations.

The Business Benefits

After working to identify unattached volumes, Sysco was able to remove the offending resources and reduce total unused Amazon EBS storage by more than 90%. Not just a one-time fix, unused volume costs have remained low by staying vigilant, with 2nd Watch sending a regular report of unattached volumes to catch offenders before they are able to incur costs. After completing the volume migrations, more than 90% of general-purpose volume storage is the latest generation gp3 volume type. Just like with unattached volumes, regular reviews of cloud spend can help identify new usage provisioning old volume types due to outdated cloud formation templates or stacks. Calling these out to application owners can help ensure costs continue to stay low.

As a result of these actions, Sysco realized a 30% savings in monthly volume costs, which worked out to more than $300K annual reduction in spend.

In addition to the large cost savings, this exercise emphasized the importance of cost visibility. By maintaining an effective account and tagging strategy, Sysco was able to quickly work with the right application owners to implement recommendations despite the complexity of their environment. Secondly, it emphasized the importance of establishing guard rails to ensure adherence to best practices and keeping costs low.