Cast AI data shows Kubernetes users spending too much money

Clusterstruck

Cloud customers pay an average of three times higher in cloud computing costs for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud than they should, according to Cast AI. Helping them manage those costs becomes a business in itself.

The startup specializes in Kubernetes automation and cost optimization and reporting for cloud-native applications. Its platform uses artificial intelligence to determine which compute resources are needed for specific Kubernetes workloads and automatically selects the best combination, configuring CPUs and memory to avoid excessive provisioning.

It constantly adds or removes resources as needed, ensuring customers don’t overspend without compromising workload availability or performance, according to the company.

• “It’s impossible to do this exercise as a person,” said co-founder and Chief Product Officer Laurent Gil. “We’ve decomplexed the capabilities. We’re making Kubernete or containers server-free by saying we’ll take care of the servers, and we’ll make the servers cost-efficient.”
• Cast AI was born from the failures of its co-founders on their cloud bills as they ran the previous startup: Zenedge, a cloud-based, AI-driven cybersecurity startup acquired by Oracle in 2018.
• “At the start of that company, I would spend about $ 1,000 to $ 2,000 a month on AWS,” Gil said. “Three years later… that was $ 2 million dollars – so far the company’s highest value, and we were very, very disappointed. We’re happy to ride on customers, but every time we add a client, our AWS bill goes to the roof. “
• AWS’s answer is for Zenedge to prepay for three years to reduce its cloud bill by 40%, but Zenedge doesn’t want to be locked in, according to Gil. At Cast AI, he and his co-founders developed the spending management product they wanted to have before.

Companies using Cast AI services can reduce their cloud computing spending by 65% ​​on average, according to Gil. Those services work with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Service and Kubernetes Operations on AWS.

• “The engine will immediately understand what applications you have … and how much compute and memory they are currently using, and how much the operational cost is based on the machine on which these applications are installed,” said Gil in the Protocol.
• While there’s no big difference between Big Three cloud provider prices, Gil said, within each cloud itself, there are cost differences when it comes to processors.
• “Most … are cheaper at AMD than Intel,” Gil said. “That makes our machine use more AMD sometimes for compute-intensive [workloads]. But the machine is trained to know it, so we always choose the option with the lowest cost. “
• “One thing that surprises us … is that the average cost savings we give to anyone who uses us … is 65%,” he said.

Read the full report here.

– Donna Goodison (email | kaba)

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Google has sucked up Sidewalk Labs data (and Doctoroff will return to development in the future)

When Alphabet’s “city of the future” Sidewalk Toronto project exploded in 2020, it was a crash that was heard around the world. But few data -hungry city technology companies have crawled from the bottom of the devastation and are living to this day. Google has been part of sidewalk subsidiaries including “smart” parking company Pebble, energy tech company Mesa and factory-automated timber construction provider Canopy Buildings.

Now, the data transfer has begun.

“We are writing to let you know that, on or after June 30, 2022, your information will be transferred from Sidewalk Labs to Google LLC,” said an email sent to people (including this reporter) who sign up for updates from Coord, the Sidewalk company now named Pebble.

Expect the data transfer to include more than just names and email addresses, though. Like many of the Sidewalk branches, Pebble wants to digitize city environments. That means new data sets associated with city spaces – What’s on that curb? – to better use those spaces, or help delivery companies with that “last mile” problem.

Oh, and a “side” note: When Sidewalk founder and CEO Dan Doctoroff – a former NYC deputy mayor for Economic Development under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and former CEO of Bloomberg LP – announced Sidewalk reorg in December, he said he would step down from his role with the company, revealing that he may have ALS.

At the time, she said her goal was to spend time caring for her grandson and “finally learn[ing] speak French fluently. ” Now, just a few months later, he is back to building the future. Doctoroff joined a new blue-ribbon panel set by NYC Mayor Eric Adams and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for “developing actionable strategies for the revitalization and resilience of the city’s commercial districts.”

– Kate Kaye (email | kaba)

HashiCorp: You probably need a cloud platform team

As the barriers to COVID-19 eased and allowed more travel in the last quarter, HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet and co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar spent almost the entire time visiting in person the customers of the company’s Global 2000. They heard the same theme, according to McJannet: the emergence of centralized cloud program offices or cloud platform teams.

While these team platforms – sometimes referred to as cloud centers of excellence – are prevalent under cloud -native companies, the concept hasn’t left much of Global 2000, according to McJannet.

“We have this weird perch in the middle of the cloud market as the kind of enabling technology that everyone uses to interface with the clouds, so we just sit down with the data flow of what everyone’s cloud approach looks like,” he said. by McJannet in Protocol. “The technical problem with how you run the cloud is really well understood, but there’s really an organizational shift that we’re also seeing in all of these companies.”

McJannet described this in terms of a “cloud 1.0” versus a “cloud 2.0” approach.

“In the cloud 1.0 approach, in the organization, I would say,‘ Hey, build me an app on Amazon, ’and your developers would build an app on Amazon,” McJannet said. “You think you’re happy, but 12 months later, you find you’ve spent too much on your Amazon bill, and there’s a bunch of applications and the security team is like, ‘What are you doing? It’s not a private one. network. It’s all running on the public internet. We’re going to CNN – stop. ‘”

That’s where cloud platform teams come in to standardize how developers interact with the cloud and bring more control in accordance with policy and management.

“I would say for everyone who successfully uses the cloud, yes, it’s super prevalent,” McJannet said. “But I can say most people are very early in their cloud development. Every cloud-native company, like Slack or Stripe, they’re all built this way. They have a platform team, and then they have it developers.But I would say in Global 2000, no, maybe only about one-third of them or half of them have evolved to the level of maturity.

– Donna Goodison

Around the enterprise

ServiceNow acquired Hitch Works, a company committed to helping management determine which of their employees have the skills needed for important projects, for an unspecified amount.