Optimizing Cloud infrastructure to enhance business performance
In this Q&A, we speak with Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO of Granulate, to find out how can companies can harness the Cloud to minimize downtime and ensure their servers operate at scale
Even before the pandemic, the Cloud was becoming more widely adopted to support the growing demand for digital-native applications. How are companies making this transition as smooth as possible, including minimizing downtime and ensuring servers can operate at scale?
Cloud transition has been further accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis, cloud spending rose 37% during the first quarter of 2020. In order to make this transition as smooth as possible, now, more than ever, companies are leveraging external resources and adapting their technology stack and scaling their workforce.
These efforts include optimizing for buying decisions rather than developing internally to expedite the technological transition. Rebuilding their organizational structure to reflect agile operations and enterprise-wide collaboration between different teams and optimizing the business-technology operating model to support better efficiency and scalability.
Q: What are some challenges IT teams are experiencing with cloud infrastructure?
- Security of Data – With the transition to cloud IT, teams are facing new security and privacy challenges that require implementing new security controls. Cloud-based companies are faced with increased security and privacy concerns in regards to the processing and managing of data.
- Lack of expertise and resources – Companies are placing more workloads in the cloud, while cloud technologies continue to rapidly advance and the need for expertise continues to grow. Organizations need to add cloud specialists to their IT team in order to support the new cost optimization, governance and security needs.
- Cloud Cost Management – The on-demand and scalable nature of cloud computing services make it very difficult to define and predict quantities and costs. Moreover, traditional practices of lift & shift create new challenges of sprawling cloud costs which require significant resources and expertise to optimize.
Q: Why/how is optimizing the performance of existing infrastructure a solution for optimizing business operations and increasing revenue?
For digital companies, infrastructure costs are one of the top three drivers for the organization. Application performance and infrastructure performance are often two sides of the same coin, by optimizing the application and infrastructure performance, organizations require less compute resources to support their cloud workloads, leading to significant cloud cost reduction which in turns translates to optimized business operations and better margins.
Q: How does maximizing the use of servers result in a reduction of CO2 emissions?
Maximizing the use of servers by improving the utilization and increasing the compute density leads to requiring fewer servers in order to run a specific same application and support a specific workload. Technology is a big part of the energy problem, on par with the aviation industry’s fuel emissions, as the ICT (information and communication technology) ecosystem accounts for 2% of the carbon footprint. By addressing energy efficiency in power-hungry global data centre farms, technology can also be part of the solution. Data centres already account for over 1% of all global carbon emissions, projected to increase as demand for computers rises.
Optimizing servers for individual application demands and challenges can help data centers to save energy, power, and electricity. Data centers aren’t using the full potential of virtualization, cloud technology, or related resources; they’re overprovisioning, allocating applications inefficiently, and managing infrastructure inefficiently. By introducing new software performance optimization, data centers can cost-effectively impact carbon footprint.
Q: How can increasing server utilization impact a businesses bottom line?
Increasing server utilization means increasing compute efficiency which directly translates to requiring fewer servers to run a specific application or workload. For cloud companies this means running their workloads at lower costs, decreasing the operational costs and increasing their profit margins.
Q: What’s hindering businesses from using an infrastructure performance optimization solution?
Up until recently, the solution offering in the segment of infrastructure performance optimization solutions required significant resources to implement including R&D efforts and time invested in refactoring or rearchitecting the application. New innovative solutions of configuration optimization now allow companies to implement 3rd party solutions and benefit from improved application and performance. This includes lower costs from not having to invest in R&D resources and lowering risks.
Q: Can you tell us more about how Granulate’s solution works?
Granulate employs real-time continuous performance optimization to allow organizations to handle compute workloads with 60% fewer servers while improving performance by 40%, with no code changes required.
Granulate automatically learns the application’s specific resource usage patterns and data flow to identify contended resources, bottlenecks and prioritization opportunities. Granulate then tailors OS-level scheduling and prioritization decisions to improve the infrastructure’s application-specific performance and enable significant cost reduction.
About Asaf Ezra, CEO and co-founder of Granulate:
Asaf Ezra is the co-founder and CEO of Granulate, a performance optimization cloud computing startup committed to enabling companies to significantly reduce energy usage by enabling full optimization of their existing infrastructure. He previously held positions as R&D Team Leader and Project Manager where he led 30+ researchers, engineers and analysts in large scale projects. Co-founding Granulate, he hopes to democratize performance and build a world without performance loss. A Talpiot program alumnus, Asaf continued his IDF service as a commander in the elite 8200 intelligence unit.
