In just six months, Nexolink Solutions cut its monthly infrastructure expenses by 35%, with more savings on the way. Discover how Right Mind designed and implemented this cost-effective strategy.
About the Company
Nexolink Solutions is an international company based in the Netherlands with over 20 years of expertise in the cables and pipelines industry. The company offers smart software solutions, project management services, and legal consultancy to help excavators and network operators achieve high operational efficiency.
Nexolink is dedicated to supporting innovation and strengthening the cables and pipelines infrastructure sector, especially in managing fiber optic installations for homes and businesses.
The company provides GEO information, minimizes cable and pipeline damage, and ensures infrastructure project deadlines and procedures are met. Through these efforts, Nexolink Solutions continues to push innovation and progress in the industry.
The Challenge: Rising Infrastructure Costs
Despite a stable customer base and steady revenue, Nexolink Solutions faced increasing infrastructure costs.
This was partly due to migrating to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Initially effective, the chosen solutions weren't optimal for future needs. Given the app’s development stage and limited resources, the team had to make practical decisions to keep it running, such as relying on NFS volumes for file storage. Due to competing priorities and time constraints, there was little opportunity to redesign systems, leading to escalating costs.
Optimization Process
Here’s a summary of the steps taken and their financial impact:
- Replacing Long-Term Storage
Files from the “Dossier” system were migrated from Filestore (a managed NFS solution) to Google Cloud Storage. This replaced a rapidly growing 21.5 TiB Filestore instance with regional, secure storage components.
Result: Storage and backup costs dropped by over $4,500 per month, while performance, durability, and resilience improved significantly. - Reducing GKE Nodes by Optimizing App Configuration
New app features increased resource requirements, pushing usage beyond purchased Committed Use Discounts.
Optimizations included fine-tuning the Apache web server and PHP interpreter settings to improve RAM usage efficiency and simplifying the app’s container startup process, reducing resource consumption for scheduled jobs.
Result: Computing costs decreased by about $1,300 monthly due to better resource utilization and reallocation. - Optimizing GPU Usage
An image recognition tool was introduced but the GPU was underutilized.
Using GPU time-sharing for Kubernetes nodes allowed up to 4 pods to share a GPU, cutting costs considerably, especially during scaling.
Result: Saved $240 per month. - Reducing GCP Log Volumes
Duplicate logs collected during migration were stopped, easing data flow challenges caused by multiple environments and heavy traffic.
Result: Estimated savings between $150 and $250 monthly. - Additional Savings Measures
- Consolidated non-production databases into a single instance, saving $114/month.
- Switched non-production environments from Filestore to self-hosted NFS, saving $100–$150/month.
- Adopted a more efficient compression method for OpenSearch indices, reducing index size by 60% with minimal performance impact, saving up to $300/month.
Total Savings
The optimization project started in July 2024. By January 2025, Right Mind had achieved $7,500 in monthly savings, with further reductions planned.
Nexolink Solutions’ infrastructure bill went from $23,500 in June 2024 down to $15,800 in January 2025 — totaling around $90,000 in yearly savings with more to come.
Future Optimization Plans
Although most infrastructure runs on Google Cloud, the next phase targets AWS OpenSearch services.
Plans include migrating the existing cluster to Google Kubernetes Engine and implementing better data compression. While this may increase maintenance complexity, using the Kubernetes OpenSearch Operator greatly simplifies management.
Optimization is ongoing, and more opportunities are being explored to lower Nexolink Solutions’ infrastructure costs while providing efficient, reliable support for growth and performance.
