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StormForge— transforming Kubernetes environments and resource management

StormForge— transforming Kubernetes environments and resource management

Providing developers with a container orchestration platform that enables them to scale applications easily and simply deploy them has made Kubernetes the holy grail of container orchestration and microservices.

While Kubernetes automates much of the work of managing containers at scale, containerized applications commonly share pooled resources. Therefore, you need to allocate and manage them properly.

StormForge offers some of the most innovative and robust Kubernetes resource management services in the market. The company brings together world-class data scientists and software engineers to enable enterprises to drive breakthrough IT and operations efficiency.

The StormForge Platform is unique because of its unwavering focus on building AI-powered software products that are designed to help people, not replace them. The company’s Platform is built to help IT leaders realize the promise of cloud-native and DevOps teams release with confidence—faster innovation with higher efficiency, quality, resiliency, and scalability.

The following excerpts are taken from a conversation with Matt Provo, the Founder, and CEO of StormForge

Q. How does StormForge fill the gaps in Kubernetes resource management? In what ways does the firm help to optimize your clients’ Kubernetes environments?

StormForge optimizes the efficiency of our customers’ Kubernetes and cloud-based applications, reducing cloud costs and improving application performance by 30% or more. StormForge uses machine learning to analyze performance testing data in pre-production to recommend optimal configuration settings before deployment.

Once in production, StormForge machine learning analyzes data from monitoring and observability tools and makes real-time, continuous recommendations to keep applications running efficiently as usage changes.

Q. What are some of the ways StormForge has innovatively solved client use cases? Can you give us an example?

Acquia, a provider of Drupal hosting for thousands of customers, moved to a Kubernetes-based platform to better support customer requirements and optimize the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency of its core hosting offering. With this move, Acquia needed to be able to right-size resource capacity to support customer applications, while also scaling as needed based upon each application’s consumption requirements. Without a way to automate the process, it would put a tremendous burden on resources, both in terms of gaining the expertise to support a new Kubernetes environment, and the number of resources needed to do this for every customer, every day, at scale.

 Using StormForge, Acquia realized the following key benefits:

  • Maximized the true power of Kubernetes and containers
  • Simplified management and enables teams to handle more applications
  • Reduced costs with the ability to allocate capacity and compute resources where needed
  • Improved customer experience

Q. What drives the team at StormForge to seek innovative solutions for the organization’s problems when implementing Kubernetes?

Our exceptionally talented team members are driven by their desire to learn continuously and their commitment to solving pressing problems for customers using our expertise in machine learning.

Independent thinkers and collaborative self-starters, our team has fostered a culture in which the primary driver is the power of ideas. They firmly believe that with the right ideas and proper execution,commercial success naturally follows. The team takes great pride in crafting solutions that reflect their world-class skills in machine learning and software engineering, resulting in elegant and practical products that help people solve their most complex and stubborn operational problems in user-friendly ways.

Q. DevOps teams within software firms are usually some of the busiest people. What are the ways StormForge helps DevOps alleviate its troubles?

A recent study by OverOps found that 69% of developers spend at least one day a week troubleshooting production issues. Reacting to and firefighting production issues means less time developing new and innovative capabilities that will help a company deliver a competitive advantage. StormForge automates Kubernetes resource optimization so that DevOps teams can focus on the things that truly impact their business results.

Q. What role does machine-learning play in StormForge’s efforts to provide bespoke Kubernetes Resource management?

Kubernetes environments are inherently complex, with several different variables that can be tuned to affect outcomes including cloud costs and application performance. Using a manual, trial-and-error approach is time-consuming and ultimately ineffective because, as research has shown, humans cannot effectively process more than four variables. Optimizing Kubernetes environments using an automated, machine-learning powered approach like StormForge has several benefits:

  • Decreased cloud costs

When running a Kubernetes application in the cloud, the cost of running that application is based on the resources consumed – mainly CPU and memory. StormForge customers typically see a reduction in cloud application costs in the range of 35-60% because of machine learning-assisted CPU and memory allocation.

  • Improved Application Performance

Application response times are key for a positive user experience. Studies have shown that any response time longer than 1 second can result in a less-than-optimal experience. Kubernetes optimization can identify opportunities for significant improvements in application response times and throughput.

  • Deep Application Insights

One of the intangible benefits that customers see from StormForge is the result of the scenario analysis that takes place as part of the pre-production Rapid Experimentation process. Customers gain an increased understanding of their cloud-native application and how it will behave under various scenarios.

Cloud waste is an underrated problem globally. What are the efforts StormForge has taken to combat this problem? What can other people and organizations do to help solve this?

Cloud waste is a serious issue. Our research has shown that 47% of cloud spending is wasted, which impacts not only enterprises’ bottom lines, but also the environment. StormForge is making an impact on cloud waste by helping organizations optimize their cloud resource usage. StormForge has also spearheaded a movement to reduce corporate cloud waste. Companies can show their commitment to improving both the environment and business efficiency by signing the Cloud Waste Pledge.

Helping organizations optimize their Kubernetes resources

Matt Provo is the Founder and CEO of StormForge. Matt is a three-time founder who has dedicated his career to building world class-products and leading high-performance teams while at Apple, Invisible Children (co-founder), & ParkedIn (founder & CEO - exit).

 Matt is also an alumnus of Harvard Business School.

“Automatic Kubernetes resource management at scale.”


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