FundedNext, the CFD and Futures prop firm within NEXT Ventures, runs latency- and availability-sensitive trading infrastructure. Reducing cloud cost mattered, but not at the expense of business continuity.
Context
FundedNext runs on multi-region cloud infrastructure that supports trading platforms where downtime directly affects traders. Cost had to come down without putting that continuity at risk.
My role
As Senior Engineering Manager (Platform Engineering) at NEXT Ventures, reporting to the CTO, I led the Platform team responsible for this work, from October 2024 to the present.
Approach & trade-offs
We treated cost as an ongoing FinOps practice rather than a one-off cleanup: make spend visible, prioritise changes by impact and risk, make changes incrementally, and verify that availability holds after each one.
The central trade-off was speed versus continuity. Business continuity came first, so changes that could put the trading platform at risk were sequenced carefully rather than rushed.
Results
- 65%cloud cost reduction
- 99.99%platform uptime maintained
- 75%faster deploys (40 to 10 min)
Cloud costs for FundedNext came down by 65%, while the platform continued to run at 99.99% uptime. Across FundedNext and FNmarkets, deploys also became 75% faster, from 40 to 10 minutes.
Lessons
- Cost reduction and reliability are not opposing goals when changes are prioritised by risk and verified as you go.
- Sustained savings come from a repeatable practice, not a single project.
More case studies
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- Migrating 2.5 TiB and 12M+ Objects from DigitalOcean Spaces to Amazon S3 with Zero Copy Failures
Related article: AWS Cloud Cost: Why Most Companies Overspend — and What to Do About It
Related service: Cloud cost optimization (FinOps)