Optimizing for Growth: How Mission Helped Rival Cut Infrastructure Costs Migrating to AWS

Rival is a SaaS provider for HR and recruiting. Rival partnered with Mission to implement a strategic FinOps approach that would drive their migration from on-premises infrastructure to AWS. Mission’s cost optimization expertise enabled Rival to self-fund their migration, cutting Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 17%, with goals to get savings up to 50% in the near future. The partnership with Mission has provided enterprise-level support across hundreds of accounts and helped Rival implement cost management best practices through Mission's Reserved Instance Operations and Vega Cloud’s FinOps cloud management platform.

Rival is the AI-powered talent platform that transforms potential into performance. They deliver human-centered, AI-augmented tools to attract, develop, and retain top talent. Rival simplifies talent acquisition, modernizes workflows, and improves productivity. Leveraging 20+ years of industry leadership, Rival delivers maximum business impact by enabling HR teams to rapidly execute talent strategies with precision and efficiency across the entire HR tech stack.

Rival had mature applications that had been developed over the past 15 years. They had operations spanning two data centers in the US and Canada and two cloud environments, including Azure and AWS. Rival recognized that while there are numerous ways to optimize AWS spend, achieving excellence requires specialized expertise. Rather than diverting internal resources from core business functions, they sought a partner with established skills in cloud FinOps and cloud migrations.

Rival selected Mission for its specialized expertise in AWS cost optimization, migration, and cloud services. The partnership provided immediate ROI through consolidated enterprise support for multiple AWS accounts. Mission's structured approach offered three distinct value chains: 1) cost-effective support consolidation, 2) expert technical account management with regular cost metric reviews, and 3) reserved instance operations to pursue both immediate and long-term savings. Additionally, Mission's strategic guidance and collaboration were particularly valuable, allowing Rival's team to execute the implementation work with sound knowledge transfer and long-term sustainability.

Rival chose AWS as its primary cloud platform due to its comprehensive suite of services that supported its modernization efforts. The platform's flexibility enabled them to containerize applications and run them on Amazon EKS, with paths for future database modernization from SQL Server to Amazon RDS, and eventually Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. AWS' cost optimization options, including private pricing agreements for services like S3, allowed Rival to implement a sophisticated waste-elimination program across their infrastructure.

Mission worked with Rival to implement a distinctive approach to their cloud migration. As described by Rival’s CTO, Ron Teeter, Mission "first optimized, modernized and then migrated" instead of the typical "migrate, optimize, modernize" path. This was a key element to the project (optimizing before migrating) as the savings created from cost-optimization of Rival’s existing AWS workloads would go toward funding the migration of the on-prem workloads. In this way, Rival leveraged Mission's re:Invest philosophy of using cost optimization savings to "reinvest" into future AWS projects and improvements.

Mission’s partner, Vega Cloud, played a crucial role in the new FinOps strategy for Rival, providing daily visibility into cloud expenditures. As Ron describes it, “Vega served as the focal point of our FinOps program, enabling my team to track budgets, project future spending, and ensure alignment with the company’s financial goals. The platform's ability to visualize financial data and predict billing cycles made it an indispensable tool.”

The solution also incorporated Mission's RI Operations, which focuses on optimizing reserved instances to maximize savings. Through weekly waste-elimination meetings, Rival identified opportunities to reduce costs across all infrastructure components, from compute resources to storage.

For the modernization phase, Rival containerized applications to run on EKS while using Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon EC2 with redundancy. The approach emphasized knowledge transfer to internal teams, with Mission serving as a FinOps leader providing guidance and validation. This gave Rival's team complete mastery of their deployed infrastructure.

The partnership with Mission has delivered substantial results for Rival. Their TCO has already been reduced by 17%. And as Ron Teeter states, "We're not done. My goal is to cut it in half."

This cost optimization enabled Rival to self-fund its cloud migration, creating a virtuous cycle where initial savings funded further migration efforts. The company successfully closed its Canadian data center and is on track to close its US data center later this year. Beyond cost savings, the migration to AWS has provided Rival with greater agility and development acceleration. The transition from fixed on-premises infrastructure to elastic cloud resources has improved resource utilization and been particularly valuable for managing hundreds of clients.

Summarizing the impact of the partnership, Teeter noted, "What Mission does and the AWS expertise it provides makes a huge difference for companies like ours." The successful project has positioned Rival to continue innovating while maintaining a cost-effective, efficient infrastructure.