At a glance #
- Client: Snafu Records
- Location: Los Angeles
- Industry: Music / Entertainment Technology
- Year: 2020
- Scope: Migrate Airflow workflows from EC2 to ECS/Fargate; update Terraform codebase to best practices
- Timeline: Two two-week sprints
- Outcome: Expected 40% reduction in monthly AWS bills as production workloads migrate onto the new platform
About Snafu Records #
Snafu Records, headquartered in Los Angeles, brings a new approach to finding musical talent. Founded in 2018, Snafu runs AWS workloads to track the flood of unsigned artists coming online each week, then applies algorithms to identify trending talents and sign them.
The situation before #
As Snafu’s discovery algorithms matured, the team looked for AWS expertise to streamline their infrastructure management and workflows. They ran numerous data pipelines, orchestrated by Apache Airflow, on EC2 instances — and suspected they were paying for capacity that sat idle most of the time.
“It was clear just by listening to the questions Shinichi asked us that he thoroughly understood what our stack looked like, and what we wanted to do. And the fact he knew Terraform well sealed the deal for us.”
— Felix Bender, Head of Engineering, Snafu Records
What we built #
The idea: containerize the Airflow-orchestrated workflows and run them on ECS/Fargate. Going serverless means Snafu scales out more workflows when the input volume spikes, and only pays for the compute time their workflows actually run.
Delivered over two two-week sprints:
- Refactored the Terraform codebase to reflect current AWS and Terraform best practices (modularity, state management, remote state discipline).
- Set up ECS cluster and task definitions using Terraform — fully reproducible, versioned, and reviewable in pull requests.
- Migrated the Airflow-based workflows from EC2 to ECS/Fargate, preserving workflow semantics while changing the underlying compute model.
Outcomes #
“We are very happy with the result. We suspect this would have taken us several months to accomplish on our own. And as we migrate our production workloads onto ECS, we expect to be reducing our monthly bills by 40%!”
— Felix Bender, Head of Engineering, Snafu Records
- 40% expected reduction in monthly AWS bills as production workloads move onto the new platform.
- Months of work compressed into four weeks (two two-week sprints), freeing the Snafu engineering team to focus on their algorithms instead of infrastructure.
- Scales elastically — workflows spin up when needed and spin down when done, instead of holding EC2 capacity 24/7.
- Infrastructure as Code — all of it in Terraform, version- controlled, reviewable, reproducible.
“It was a great experience working with Shinichi. We would also like to build a CI/CD pipeline for our codebase, and we hope to be working with Shinichi again on this project.”
— Felix Bender, Head of Engineering, Snafu Records
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