Jason Bloomberg IT Industry Analyst & President, Intellyx
Andrew HillierCTO, Densify
Densify enlisted the help of Jason Bloomberg, a top industry analyst and a key Forbes contributor, and Andrew Hillier, CTO of Densify and a true veteran in the software industry, to run an informational webinar on the pitfalls of cloud application management and how to overcome them.
Trying to match application demand and public cloud supply is a major industry challenge. There are currently 3.2 million ways to procure AWS resources, and that number grows when you consider Google Cloud and Azure. Andrew and Jason discussed the fact that often, “cloud isn’t paying for what you use, but rather, what you provision.” It is imperative that companies effectively provision cloud resources when you consider the enormous amount of instance permutations.
How does a company manually and effectively manage their cloud resources? The simple answer is that they cannot.
Andrew Hillier explained that the key to cloud optimization is automation. Densify constantly evaluates application resource demands against the millions of permutations of cloud supply. This predictive analysis is done with the sole goal of making applications self-aware. These applications are then able to optimize themselves, removing the need for manual matching.
After Andrew and Jason had finished up their conversation, we conducted a question and answer segment, fielding questions on what we had covered.
“Infrastructure as Code” is an important step as a maturation process for a company. However, we often find developers hardcode the values by taking their best guess of what instance type/size when deploying workloads into the cloud. This happens time and time again, and the hardcoded values are often suboptimal, either introducing operational risks or wasting OpEx dollars.
This is not the developers’ fault as it’s simply not in their job description. More importantly, it’s not humanly possible to manually match thousands of workloads with millions of permutations of cloud resources. A machine is needed to find the perfect match, and that’s why Densify exists. This is just the first glimpse of a huge paradigm shift in the industry. Imagine if your whole cloud infrastructure optimized itself based on machine-learned behavior? Infrastructure optimization is an entire leap forward from infrastructure as code. Densify makes it easy to start this process, replacing just a single line of code to make your applications self-optimizing, and this is what we call “cloud optimization as code.”