Grinding Gears

This article outlines the pragmatic approach that we’ve followed here at FreeAgent in our first 18 months of using AWS to increase our cost efficiency. Using this approach, we’ve already cut our AWS spend by 50%, and we estimate we can save another 30% a year by implementing further efficiencies. Here are 12 things we’ve learned along the way. Our strategy 1. Don’t optimise for cost too early We fully… Continue reading

This post describes our approach to fine-tuning a BERT model for multiclass categorisation with Hugging Face and Amazon SageMaker. Continue reading

Introduction For the past year, FreeAgent has been running a machine learning model in production that categorises customer bank transactions. This model takes transaction descriptions and transaction amounts as inputs, and attempts to predict the corresponding accounting category. This summer, I joined the data science team with the more specific goal of increasing model generalisation, which would allow it to make predictions for a larger fraction of incoming transactions. One… Continue reading

The following post is a high-level description of Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Container Service (ECS), the relationship between its components, and how they can be used to deploy a web application. ECS is a fully managed container service. It is akin to Kubernetes, but ultimately it is simpler and has fewer moving parts. ECS offers the security, reliability and scalability that is customary with AWS. The Fargate engine provides a… Continue reading

Seven years ago we started planning our first major infrastructure migration. Nine months later we made the move, taking FreeAgent from our first home in Rackspace London to a new, co-located home in two data centres (DCs) run by The Bunker. FreeAgent has been happily humming along in Ash and Greenham Common ever since. Co-locating has been a terrific win for us over the years, providing us with a cost-effective,… Continue reading