Guest: Raj Nair (LinkedIn)
Company: Avesha (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Avesha’s new cloud optimization tool, Smart Scaler, helps auto-scale based on application level and infrastructure level metrics, and provides visibility on application behavior and performance. In some cases, customers have seen as much as a 70% reduction in cloud costs. However, the product utilizes automation to help reduce the complexity and reduce the tedium of non-productive work for developers.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Raj Nair, CEO of Avesha, talks about their new product, Smart Scaler, and how its autoscaling capabilities are helping to reduce cloud costs. He goes on to discuss the challenges of Kubernetes and how Avesha is helping reduce the complexity for developers. He goes on to explain some of the company’s key focuses and what is in their pipeline.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Nair talks about his experiences at KubeCon, telling us he has been having valuable conversations with potential customers and partners. Avesha has just announced its partnership with Dell and has unveiled their new product, Smart Scaler.
• Smart Scaler is a cloud optimization tool that not only provides recommendations but actively auto-scales based on metrics like application-level and infrastructure metrics. Nair explains that it aims to bring visibility into application behavior and performance, with a comprehensive dashboard to help people manage their cloud spending.
• Although other tools exist, Nair believes they are not as advanced as Smart Scaler because of their use of generative AI. He talks about one of the key features, event scaler, which enables users to have a calendar of events where they can say to what level they want it to be scaled up which can help you save money.
• One of the challenges of Kubernetes is complexity but Nair believes that managing hundreds of microservices manually is impractical. He talks about how AI can be used to address this problem and reduce its complexity.
• Nair discusses to what extent Avesha is relying on generative AI, saying that since its limitations mean a human still needs to be kept in the loop. However, he does think generative AI can be used to do some of the automation that can reduce the tedium for humans. He talks us through the balanced approach Avesha is taking.
• Nair talks about where Avesha fits in the cloud-native ecosystem. Developers are currently grappling with connectivity and visibility challenges so when there is a new release, for example, developers cannot see how it is performing. He discusses how Smart Scaler is helping to address these problems.
• There are existing tools that provide cloud spending figures, and Nair explains how these tools work well with Smart Scaler. He talks about the benefits of Smart Scaler and how it pulls together all the relevant data and makes it easier to understand how the optimizations you have done with Smart Scaler have affected cloud costs.
• Nair believes that Kubernetes will become increasingly complex since it is just starting to be adopted at scale and new use cases are arising in many areas. He talks about the need to tame the complexity of scaling and making use of additional automation to help get it under control.
• Nair discusses how Avesha is evolving to grow with the customer’s needs. He talks about learning the different specific use cases for their product and how actually it is not necessarily the cloud cost savings that their customers are most interested in but the automation to make DevOps teams more efficient.
• Avesha has another product in development, Smart Traffic Director. Nair explains that it allows you to move your workloads to different clusters in response to load and latency. He tells us that they see more opportunities for automation in Smart Scaler to address complexities on the VPA side of Kubernetes.
• Nair talks about how culture factors into the mix. He tells us DevOps teams are overloaded so Avesha is trying to introduce a managed control plane to help offload them. Additionally, they are exploring ways to connect with VMs using KubeSlice.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.