Opsani Provides Free Service to Rein in Kubernetes Costs in the Cloud
Opsani, a provider of a cloud service that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to help organizations reduce cloud costs, announced it will make Opsani AI available free for the next three months to organizations that have deployed Kubernetes in the cloud as long as they are spending more than $100,000 a month on cloud services.
Company CEO Ross Schibler says this initiative, dubbed Project Vital, represents an effort to help organizations preserve headcount at a time when the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is requiring organizations to dramatically reduce headcounts. By enabling organizations to more efficiently scale down Kubernetes infrastructure resources, many of those organizations may be able to reduce their number of layoffs.
At the same time, Schibler notes there are some organizations in, for example, the entertainment and education services segment that are being asked to maximize existing cloud resources to support increased use of applications. In either scenario, IT teams are now being asked to cope with an unprecedented amount of uncertainty, he says.
In comparison to on-premises IT environments, cloud services afford IT organizations to quickly reduce costs. The challenge they face is a general lack of visibility into what workloads are consuming resources at varying levels of service. Opsani AI proactively identifies workloads that could be moved to lower-cost services in addition to tuning resources such as CPU and memory. It also optimizes middleware configuration variables such as Java virtual machine (JVM) type and pool sizes; kernel parameters such as page sizes and jumbo packet sizes; and application parameters such as thread pools, cache timeouts and write delays. The company claims Opsani AI customers are seeing more than 200% increases in performance per dollar while saving up to 80% on their cloud spend.
Opsani also makes its platform available with plugins for a variety of DevOps tools including GitHub, Terraform, Jenkins, Spinnaker, Wavefront, DataDog, SignalFX, Prometheus, Splunk and New Relic, running on all the major cloud computing platforms.
It’s not uncommon for organizations to consume cloud resources inefficiently. However, what was once perceived to be little more than an irresponsible waste of cloud resources has become an economic imperative almost overnight. Rather than charge organizations for the privilege of employing Opsani AI, Schibler says the company views the current crisis as an opportunity to give back to the IT community. Opsani will re-evaluate the ongoing need for Project Vital at the end of the three-month period.
Many IT organizations naturally have been skeptical of all things involving the application of AI to IT management. It’s really only been when IT environments became too complex to manage any other way that IT teams felt the need to embrace AI. However, the current economic crisis is clearly putting a premium on maximizing the usage of all IT resources no matter how inexpensive they may appear to be on paper. In reality, many organizations have found that for certain classes of workloads cloud computing turned out to be a lot more expensive than anticipated. The irony now is they can now have free access to a cloud service designed from the ground up to rein in those cloud costs.
