1. Overview (Project Background)

SmartScore is South Korea's largest golf platform with over 2 million users. Given the service's characteristics of concentrated real-time traffic in reservations, rounds, settlements, and notifications, stability and predictable cost structures were critical.

In the existing AWS environment, costs for Compute, RDS, NAT Gateway, and Confluent SaaS continued to rise, increasing operational burden.

To optimize performance and reduce costs, SmartScore decided to migrate the entire system to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The migration project was completed in just 3 months using a minimal downtime approach to minimize service impact.

2. Challenge (Problem Definition)

• Rising AWS costs: Increased RDS I/O, storage, backup costs, NAT Gateway, and Data Transfer expenses

• Limited capacity to handle peak reservation traffic, causing API processing delays

• Inefficient Confluent SaaS cost structure: Annual costs surging with increased message volume

• Lack of FinOps visibility making cost forecasting and management difficult

• High infrastructure cost structure limiting new service expansion

3. Solution (Resolution Approach)

• Performed full system migration using minimal downtime approach within 3 months (Full Lift-and-Optimize).

• Compute & API Server Migration: Stabilized with E4/E5 Compute and introduced OKE auto-scaling architecture.

• Database Optimization: Reduced IOPS and storage costs through OCI MySQL and Block Volume tier separation.

• APAC's First OCI Streaming with Apache Kafka: Completely replaced existing Confluent SaaS.

• Integrated Logging & Monitoring: Reduced costs compared to CloudWatch and enhanced incident detection and response speed.

• Established FinOps Framework Based on Universal Credit: Fixed costs and improved cost visibility through service-level tagging.

4. Result (Outcomes)

• Successfully migrated entire system using minimal downtime approach within 3 months.

• Reduced overall cloud costs by 30-45% compared to AWS.

• Reduced database costs by up to 50%.

• Eliminated Confluent SaaS, achieving hundreds of millions of won in annual savings.

• Built APAC's first OCI Streaming (Kafka) and reduced message processing delay by 25%.

• Improved API response delay during peak reservation times by 30%.

• Reduced operational workload by 35%.

• Achieved cost predictability enabling stable service expansion.