Vega Cloud today made a commitment to save customers at least 10% on their cloud infrastructure spending or it won’t charge for its software. Vega Cloud’s software automates cloud infrastructure management.
The Vega Cloud platform enables IT teams to connect, automate, manage and optimize new and existing networks, applications and other multi-cloud IT environments from a single console. As part of those capabilities, the company includes cost allocation and cost identification tools using a curated set of data to surface daily recommendations for cost improvements.
Vega Cloud CEO Kris Bliesner said the goal is to provide a financial operations (FinOps) capability within the context of a platform capable of acting on those recommendations that, on average, reduces cloud costs by 15% to 25%.
During uncertain economic times, IT leaders are under more pressure than ever to reduce costs. FinOps has emerged as a discipline for applying a set of best practices for specifically reducing cloud costs. In addition to reducing cloud costs, Vega Cloud is also making a case for reducing the total cost of IT by relying on a single automation framework to manage multiple clouds.
In the cloud era, many organizations have found themselves employing multiple clouds, each of which requires a separate set of tools to manage. IT teams then need to hire additional staff to manage each of those tools. As a result, the total cost of IT increases with each additional platform added to the overall IT estate.
Many organizations, of course, have allowed the number of platforms they manage to proliferate. This is because many application deployment decisions were driven by developers who can easily provision cloud infrastructure on their own. However, as concerns over the cost of cloud computing continue to rise, many organizations are revisiting how cloud infrastructure resources are used. Many of those reviews are being driven by finance teams that want cloud costs to become more predictable as cloud computing continues to account for a much larger percentage of the IT budget, noted Bliesner.
In fact, one of the challenges IT leaders have is finding a way to make sure developers and DevOps teams are more motivated to reduce costs rather than focusing entirely on how fast they can build and deploy applications, he added.
The reality is the average developer doesn’t need application build infrastructure running 24/7, so application development and testing is a great place to focus on cutting cloud costs initially, noted Bliesner. There’s also plenty of opportunity to better schedule workloads to reduce costs by relying more on lower-cost instances of cloud infrastructure, he said.
DevOps engineers, by nature, don’t want to be inefficient, so the issue comes down to providing them with the tools needed to identify resources that are being wasted, added Bliesner.
Most cloud service providers, of course, provide tools that enable IT teams to optimize spending, but Bliesner said those tools don’t go deep enough in terms of exposing issues. As a provider of an independent management framework, Vega Cloud is more committed to providing cost optimization capabilities that can be applied to multiple clouds, he added.
In general, interest in controlling cloud costs has risen sharply. Vega Cloud has been engaged with more customers researching this issue in the last four weeks than in the last three years, said Bliesner. The challenge—and the opportunity—is to not just cut cloud costs but also identify patterns that make it easier to predict them, noted Bliesner.
At this juncture, cloud costs are coming down. The only issue left to be determined is whether that goal will be accomplished with precision versus a fiat that adversely impacts an organization’s ability to continue to build and deploy software.
