How we reduced our DocumentDB cost by nearly 50% and optimized performance

Postman's activity feed, a critical component for API collaboration, faced escalating costs due to its DocumentDB usage, prompting a comprehensive architectural overhaul and optimization of the Chronicle system. Initially, DocumentDB costs surged to $6,000 per month, primarily driven by high I/O operations. The team identified that 91% of these costs stemmed from I/O, leading to an investigation and subsequent optimizations. Changes included revising the archival strategy by eliminating the shadow collection, ceasing inefficient change streams, and converting TTL-based deletes to direct deletes to reduce I/Os. These adjustments, alongside enhancements in index usage, significantly improved cluster metrics, reducing read and write I/O operations and CPU utilization while increasing the IndexBufferCacheHitRatio. The optimizations led to a 40% reduction in I/O costs and a 49% overall cost reduction, achieved by minimizing instance usage and decreasing backup and storage expenses. Despite these gains, the team continues to explore further optimizations to address persistent high VolumeReadIOPs.

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