Guest: Puneet Gupta (LinkedIn)
Company: Amberflo (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

The elastic nature of the cloud whereby usage goes up and down requires a different approach to how customers are charged since one customer’s consumption of the infrastructure may be different from another’s. Amberflo helps businesses track and charge based on usage, providing them with real-time insights so they can make informed pricing decisions.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Puneet Gupta, CEO and Founder of Amberflo, talks about how the company’s cloud metering and usage-based pricing and billing platform is helping businesses charge and track usage. He talks about why it is important for developers to have these metering insights and how it enables companies to scale and grow.

Key highlights from this video interview :

• Gupta gives us an overview of Amberflo and tells us about how it is helping companies charge and track usage. He talks about Amberflo’s cloud metering and usage-based pricing and billing platform.
• While developers are not involved in the process of collecting payments, they are responsible for keeping track of usage instrumentation. Gupta explains that since cloud resources are elastic, consumption can vary, and that needs to be reflected in how they charge their customers.
• Gupta discusses how cost allocation and billing go hand in hand and developers need to understand what their usage is in order to track it in real time at a granular level. From there, they can control and optimize the costs and build an operational efficiency loop in the cloud infrastructure.
• Gupta shares a personal story from his time as a general manager at AWS where the team was building tier-1 AWS services. He talks about being kept out of the cost conversations, which were under the product and engineering team’s remit, and how that changed with the cloud.
• As more workloads shift to Kubernetes and Docker infrastructure, companies need to have artifacts in place to enable them to continue to grow and scale. Gupta explains you need visibility into the usage and how much is being allocated to which customer and into your operational footprint, which can be done with metering.
• When looking at SaaS applications, Gupta feels that it’s inevitable that developers are going to need metering. Companies that are utilizing generative AI will have to go down the usage-based pricing and billing path since they are consuming a third-party artifact from a cloud provider or third party who will be charging you on a usage model.
• Gupta explains that generative AI models are charging you on a token basis, so you need to ensure you have the infrastructure to meet those needs. He talks about their three products: Billing Cloud, Metering Cloud, and Cloud Price Quote (CPQ) Cloud, and how they are enabling companies in metering and usage-based pricing and billing.
• Gupta talks about the difference between metering and cloud cost management: saying cloud cost management is mainly parsing your cloud providers’ bills but this does not give the visibility of which customers are running on the infrastructure. However, Amberflo’s metering builds multi-tenant visibility on top of a single-tenant system.
• Amberflo is enabling developers to charge or monetize from generative AI and Gupta talks about how companies who have built a metering service to get ahead of cloud cost management parsing have been able to later use different value-added applications on top once they have this infrastructure in place.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.