Reducing AWS Costs by 25% for World of Books

Online Retailer

Global

Security, Privacy & Human Oversight

Privacy is enforced in the pipeline itself. Dedicated detection flags faces and personally identifiable information, and any inspection touching privacy-sensitive content is automatically routed for human review rather than auto-approved. Access to AWS resources is governed by least-privilege IAM, and all processing runs inside a controlled AWS account.

For the cases that need judgment, a review dashboard gives experts a clear queue ordered by priority. When a reviewer corrects or confirms an AI result, both the original output and the human decision are captured - building an ever-growing, labelled dataset of ground truth that feeds future evaluation and model improvement.

Results & Impact

Through Hex networks' holistic and automated approach, World of Books achieved a 25% reduction in their AWS costs within six months.

Other key outcomes included:

Increased Efficiency: The optimized architecture and automated scaling cut idle resources by 30%.
Enhanced Cost Visibility and Governance: With monitoring and alerts in place, World of Books could maintain control over their cloud expenses and prevent unforeseen cost spikes.
Simplified Maintenance: Automation of start/stop processes and backup management reduced the administrative overhead for their IT team.

World of Books is a leading online retailer specializing in the sale of used books. With a mission to make literature more accessible and sutainable, they provide a vast selection of pre-owned books, giving them a second life.

Founded on principles of environmental responsibility and circular economy, World of Books serves a global customer base, offering affordable and sustainable alternatives to new books.

The company has embraced technology to manage its extensive inventory and streamline the customer experience, all while minimizing waste and promoting reuse.

As World of Books grew, they noticed a steady increase in their AWS expenses,

impacting their budget and operational goals. Key issues contributing to these

costs included:

Underutilized and Unused Resources: Instances, storage, and services that were under or not fully utilized, leading to significant wastage.
Scaling Inefficiencies: Spikes in website traffic were not optimized, resulting in unnecessary costs during off-peak periods.
Outdated Architecture and Redundant Backups: Legacy resources and backup practices led to higher costs without added value.
Unmonitored Data Transfers: Cross-region data transfers were incurring high costs without an optimized transfer plan.

World of Books turned to Hex Networks for a solution that could streamline their

AWS infrastructure, optimize usage, and significantly reduce costs without

affecting performance or scalability.

Solutions by Hex Networks

Hex Networks deployed a targeted, multi-phase cost optimization plan to help World of Books reduce AWS costs by 25%. This solution encompassed resource management, architecture modifications, and automation enhancements.

Resource Cleanup & Architecture Modification

Removing Unused Resources: A comprehensive audit identified and removed unused EC2 instances, redundant backups, and unnecessary snapshots, instantly reducing costs.
Architecture Optimization: We made modifications to the architecture to align better with World of Books' actual needs, simplifying the infrastructure to reduce complexity and cost.
Enhanced Resource Visibility: Tools were implemented to improve resource tracking, so unused resources could be detected and addressed immediately.

Right-Sizing with AWS EC2 Optimizer

EC2-Optimizer Tool: Hex Networks used AWS's EC2-Optimizer to analyze instance usage, adjusting instance sizes and types based on actual workload needs.
Resource Adjustment: Based on the EC2-Optimizer findings, Hex Networks switched to smaller or more cost-effective instance types, achieving an optimal configuration for each workload.
Continuous Monitoring: Automated monitoring was established to ensure right-sizing adjustments could be maintained over time as demand fluctuates.

Scheduling for EC2 & RDS Instances

AWS EventBridge Automation: Using Amazon EventBridge, we scheduled start and stop times for EC2 and RDS instances, particularly for development and testing environments.
Automated Cost Savings: Instances would automatically stop during off hours, reducing manual intervention and cutting idle-time costs.
Flexible Scheduling Options: Custom scheduling was set up to adjust times based on business needs, ensuring resources were available only when necessary.

Reserved Instances (RIs) & Savings Plans

Reserved Instances for Predictable Workloads: Reserved Instances were implemented for consistent, predictable workloads to secure lower rates.
Customized Savings Plans: Based on historical usage data, Hex Networks created Savings Plans that covered fluctuating workloads, providing additional flexibility and savings.
Cost Analysis and Forecasting: A detailed cost analysis helped ensure that both RIs and Savings Plans were optimized to deliver long-term value without overcommitting.

Backup & Snapshot Optimization

Efficient Backup Policy: Hex Networks implemented a streamlined backup policy, reducing redundant snapshots and setting up automated deletions.
Lifecycle Policies for Snapshot Management: Automatic lifecycle policies were created for backups, minimizing storage usage and saving costs by retaining only essential data.
Cloud Storage Optimization: Data that required long-term storage was moved to AWS Glacier and Infrequent Access tiers, further reducing storage expenses.

Data Transfer Analysis & Optimization

Cross-Region Data Transfer Analysis: We analyzed cross-region transfers to identify areas where data transfer costs were unnecessarily high.
Data Consolidation: Redundant data transfer paths were consolidated ensuring cost-effective data movement.
Optimized Data Transfer Strategy: Strategies were implemented to reduce frequent inter-region transfers, ensuring data remained within low-cost boundaries when possible.

Intelligent Image Analysis Pipeline

Each uploaded photograph flows through a parallel quality-and-safety stage before analysis. Amazon Rekognition scores every image for sharpness, brightness, relevance, and resolution, while dedicated detection steps flag people or personally identifiable content and surface obvious risk indicators. Low-quality or irrelevant images are caught early, so the AI spends its effort only on usable evidence.

Qualifying images are then analyzed by Amazon Bedrock, which produces a detailed property assessment - condition, identified issues, risk factors, and underwriting considerations - and assigns each individual finding a confidence score from 0 to 100. Findings that fall below a configurable threshold are suppressed, so noisy “maybes” never reach the final report.

The Decision Gate: Confidence-Based Automation

At the heart of the platform is a decision gate that evaluates every inspection against six checks:

Confidence,
Image quality,
Internal consistency,
Risk severity,
Privacy, and
insurability.

Per-finding scores are rolled up into a single inspection level confidence number and a HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW certainty band, giving reviewers and downstream systems both granular and at-a-glance signals.

When all six checks pass, the inspection is approved automatically and the carrier is notified through Amazon SNS. If any check fails, the inspection is routed to a QA queue on Amazon SQS and tagged HIGH, MEDIUM, or LOW priority based on which checks failed - so reviewers naturally pick up the most urgent cases first.

A configurable mode lets Viewspection run fully automated or send every inspection to a human, with no code change.

Automated Report Processing

Prior inspection reports rarely arrive as clean data - they are PDFs. The platform ingests these automatically, extracts their text and tables with Amazon Textract, and breaks the content into semantically meaningful chunks.

Each chunk is embedded with Amazon Titan Embeddings and indexed for retrieval, turning static documents into a searchable knowledge base for the property.

Historical findings become instantly available to inform new inspections and to detect discrepancies between what a report claimed and what the images now show.

Unified RAG: Retrieval Across Reports and Images

A defining feature of ViewSignals is that it treats images and documents as one body of knowledge. The AI analysis of every image is converted into text, embedded with Amazon Titan Embeddings, and indexed into the same Amazon OpenSearch Serverless vector store that holds the report chunks.

Because both sources share a single property-scoped index, any retrieval for a property surfaces both image-derived and document-derived context. Every subsequent inspection of that property automatically benefits from the accumulated history of all previously processed images and reports - the system grows more informed about each property over time.

Helping Businesses Optimize

This case exemplifies Hex Networks' commitment to helping businesses optimize cloud costs through a data-driven, automated, and highly tailored approach.

By focusing on efficient resource management, automated scaling, and smart cost planning, Hex Networks empowered World of Books to reduce expenses and achieve greater operational sustainability.

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A Serverless Architecture Built for Scale & Cost

The entire platform is serverless. AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions run the processing pipeline, Amazon S3 stores media and outputs, Amazon DynamoDB holds inspection state, and Amazon API Gateway exposes the submission and review APIs. There are no servers to patch or scale; the system scales elastically with inspection volume and costs nothing when idle.

Cost is treated as a first-class concern. Every Bedrock and Titan call records its token usage, which is priced and written back onto the inspection record as a stage-by-stage cost breakdown. Viewspection gets a precise per-inspection dollar figure, making it straightforward to price the service to carriers and to confirm that model or prompt changes actually reduce cost.