Cutting a multi-country e-commerce cloud bill by more than a third

The client

Jumia — e-commerce, Lagos, Nigeria.

The challenge

Years of fast growth had left the platform with hundreds of over-provisioned instances, orphaned storage volumes, duplicated environments and no clear owner for cloud spend. The bill was rising faster than order volume, and finance had no way to tie costs to teams or features.

What we did

We started with a four-week assessment of billing, utilisation and architecture, then worked with each engineering team to apply the changes without a freeze on feature work.

• Right-sized compute and databases based on real utilisation data
• Autoscaling for the storefront and search services tied to traffic patterns, including sale-day peaks
• Storage tiering and lifecycle policies for images and logs
• Reserved capacity for the stable baseline, spot capacity for batch jobs
• Cost allocation tags, dashboards and monthly FinOps reviews with finance

Results

Monthly spend fell by 36 percent within the first quarter with no measurable impact on page speed or checkout conversion. More importantly, every team can now see what their services cost, and cost reviews are part of the normal engineering cadence.

Our cloud bill was growing faster than our revenue. Linestech cut it by more than a third without touching performance, and the savings paid for the engagement in the first quarter.
— Director of Engineering, Nigeria, Jumia