How PubNub unlocked $4.21M in savings — without re-architecting a single service.
The challenge
PubNub's real-time messaging infrastructure runs across a large AWS fleet with variable but predictable baseline demand. Like many high-growth infrastructure companies, they were running predominantly on-demand — leaving significant savings on the table with every billing cycle.
The challenge was not just purchasing commitments. It was managing them at scale: tracking expiry dates, right-sizing instance families, and avoiding over-commitment as the fleet evolved.
"We were leaving millions on the table every year with on-demand pricing. The managed commitment approach let us capture those savings without taking on the operational risk of managing it ourselves."James Hamilton — VP Operations & Controller, PubNub
The outcome
By adopting a managed commitment strategy, PubNub eliminated the overhead of manual RI and Savings Plan management while capturing savings across their full eligible spend. The $4.21M figure reflects net savings over 18 months from optimised coverage across compute, with no changes to application architecture or deployment topology.
With 41% of their fleet covered under active commitments, PubNub has a predictable baseline cost — and a clear framework for extending coverage as their footprint grows.
Savings figures reflect managed cloud commitment outcomes from a third-party provider. Automatum assists ISVs in listing on and transacting through cloud marketplaces; this result is presented as category proof of what managed commitment programmes can deliver.
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