Our Investment in Opsani — Continuous Cloud Optimization

During my time on Cisco’s Corporate Development team I supported the UCS server division and had a firsthand view of the massive shift in computing architecture to the cloud. Companies replatform to the cloud to decrease operational burdens, increase agility, and improve scalability.

While using cloud infrastructure, teams often emphasize accelerated software delivery to remain competitive over performance and cost optimization. Parkmycloud estimates $14.1B of cloud compute spending will be wasted in 2019. I discussed cloud expensive management as a key 2019 DevOps trend here.

Businesses use performance engineers and cloud consultants to manually conduct point in time performance/cost analysis. Unfortunately, code is updated so frequently today, their recommendations are quickly out-of-date and useless. We believe teams can have it all — incredible application user experiences at optimized costs.

Enter Opsani, a continuous cloud optimization solution to fine-tune runtime environments. Using ML models, Opsani continuously assesses the efficient frontier between the performance and the cost of running services in the cloud. Opsani’s models evaluate more than just the infrastructure layer like instance types and sizing, but also additional application parameters like middleware configuration, garbage collection, worker threads, etc.

Moreover, Opsani eliminates previously manual actions through automation, taking the burden off engineering and DevOps teams. Before each deployment Opsani runs a canary test of the new service in the production and applies its AI to evaluate the ideal runtime environment. The application layer visualizes the ML analysis, and Opsani’s explainable AI makes suggestions that are easily understood in plain language. DevOps teams can choose to individually apply the recommendations or automatically push them to production.

We became excited about Opsani for multiple reasons:

1. The performance gains and cost benefits were staggering. Opsani is currently running their software in production with publicly traded companies and unicorns. Customers’ love for Opsani’s benefits are palpable (Ancestry customer press release here).
2. Opsani addresses a top concern for engineering leadership. During numerous diligence calls and at our community leader dinners, performance and cost engineering universally came up as an initiative. Flexera’s State of the Cloud Survey also identified managing cloud costs as a top priority for the third year in a row. Afterall, wouldn’t you like to be the engineering leader that improves user experience while simultaneously cutting costs? If you work at a publicly traded company, your efforts could improve gross margins and in turn, increase the stock price — WOOHOO!
3. Developers shouldn’t have to know the ideal infrastructure for their service. Devs are under pressure to push business logic as quickly as possible. Their core competency is writing great code, not knowing all the AWS instance types or pricing. They shouldn’t be spending their time figuring out infrastructure, they should be focused on creating amazing software. Opsani empowers them to do this.
4. Cloud performance tuning and cost optimization is a great application of AI. Opsani has found that a basic five-container app can have more than 255 trillion different hardware and software resources and parameter permutations. The volume of parameters, changing infra environment, and frequency of code pushes makes it impossible for a human to optimize a system in a useful timeframe.

Serial entrepreneurs Ross Schibler and Peter Nickolov founded Opsani. Ross is a third-time Redpoint entrepreneur having previously founded Rapid City (acquired by Nortel) and Topspin (acquired by Cisco). Ross served as the CTO for Cisco’s data center servers, storage, and networking BU. Peter founded 3tera (acquired by CA), which was one of the first cloud operating systems and became CA’s fastest-growing product. At CA, he was the technical leader for the AppLogic Cloud Platform leading teams of hundreds of employees globally. The team is well-positioned in the cloud optimization space as they have firsthand experience transitioning companies to the public cloud, building solutions for cloud environments, and managing businesses at scale.

We’re excited to have led the Series A investment in Opsani alongside existing investors Zetta Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. We are thrilled to partner with Ross, Peter, and the entire team on the journey forward. If you are interested in joining the stellar team, please check out their careers page here.