AWS Cost management: Optimize Barilla’s Cloud Expenses

Simulation details

Company Overview
Barilla is a leading food manufacturing company known for its high-quality pasta and bakery products, including the “Barilla Classico” pasta and the award-winning “Dolce Vita” bakery line. With an annual production of over 500 million units, Barilla operates 15 distribution centers across Europe, including major hubs in Milan, Paris, and Berlin. These centers handle over 1,000 shipments daily, ensuring products reach retailers within 24 to 48 hours. Barilla combines traditional recipes with modern production techniques, reducing production time by 20% while maintaining artisanal quality. The company leverages AWS services, including over 200 EC2 instances, extensive S3 storage, RDS databases, and Lambda functions, processing approximately 50 terabytes of data monthly. Recently, Barilla faced a significant challenge with a 30% spike in seasonal demand, leading to an additional 500,000 Euros in AWS cloud costs, highlighting the need for better resource management and cost optimization strategies.

Challenge
The main challenge is to reduce Barilla’s AWS cloud infrastructure costs, which currently amount to nearly 3 million Euros annually. The goal is to identify inefficiencies within Barilla’s AWS setup and propose actionable solutions to optimize costs without compromising performance or compliance with European data protection regulations. Key inefficiencies include underutilized EC2 instances, excessive S3 storage costs, and over-provisioned RDS databases. Balancing cost reduction with performance optimization and compliance presents several challenges, particularly during peak seasons when demand spikes by up to 30%.

Mission
In this simulation, you assume the role of a Senior Cloud Architect at Deloitte. Your primary responsibility is to analyze Barilla’s AWS infrastructure and identify cost-saving opportunities. You will interact with key stakeholders, including Barilla’s cloud team, two Deloitte colleagues, and the executive team at Barilla. Your tasks include conducting an initial analysis of Barilla’s AWS infrastructure, identifying specific cost-saving opportunities, and proposing a comprehensive cost-reduction strategy. You will need to evaluate trade-offs between different optimization techniques, ensure compliance with European data protection regulations, and choose the most feasible and impactful recommendations to include in the strategy.

Expected Outcomes
To complete the simulation, you need to:
1. Produce an Initial Analysis Report detailing Barilla’s AWS infrastructure, highlighting current cost structure and usage patterns.
2. Create a Cost-Saving Opportunities Report identifying specific cost-saving opportunities with an evaluation of trade-offs.
3. Develop a Comprehensive Cost-Reduction Strategy with actionable recommendations.
4. Wrap the final assets into a single PDF and send it to Giovanni Moretti, the Cloud Solutions Director at Deloitte.

KPIs to be reached:
– Reduction of AWS costs by at least 20%.
– Ensuring no compromise on system performance during peak seasons.
– Compliance with European data protection regulations.

Team

Who you will work with in this Simulation
Your team is 100% generated by AI – you will not interact with real people and no human will read your conversation.

Alessandro Rossi
Cloud Team Lead

Clara Bianchi
Cloud Cost Optimization Specialist

Marco De Luca
Executive Team Member

Elena Russo
Compliance Expert

Luca Conti
IT Operations Manager

Giovanni Moretti
Cloud Solutions Director

Organization

A global professional services firm providing audit, consulting, tax, and advisory services.