Zesty
Pioneering Optimization in Cloudonomics

“How often should businesses optimize their cloud infrastructure to reap cost benefits without driving performance and stability issues?”

Today, this question is in the spotlight, captivating the minds of astute industry leaders seeking to adopt cloud costsaving strategies in response to the market tailwinds and subsequent economic volatility. While harnessing AWS discounts and Savings Plans emerges as a convenient route to cut hefty on-demand prices, navigating the pay-as-you-go model is no easy feat. A diverse range of services and configurations, as well as varying workloads and user behavior, hinder the leaders from ensuring optimal cloud usage. This often leads to companies overprovisioning their infrastructure, from storage to CPU and beyond, in their quest for undeterred application performance and stability. The result: significant savings opportunities remain untapped.

This is where Zesty, a leading, automated cloud cost optimization solution provider focusing on making the cloud infrastructure more dynamic, can help.

Maxim Melamedov, co-founder and CEO of Zesty, says, “When businesses and their compute requirements continually shift and unpredictable workloads outnumber the predictable, clients find it challenging to achieve the balance where expenses are kept low while maintaining top-notch application performance. This complex effort surpasses human capabilities.”

A deep, real-time understanding of the trade-offs between costs and performance across all business operations is vital to meet the expected service level agreements (SLA) and capitalize on the discount commitment. As a pioneer in making cloud infrastructure more dynamic, Zesty is on a mission to help organizations attain the optimal balance to support their infrastructure requirements for cost, performance, and stability. Its solutions for a range of cloud native services support DevOps and FinOps teams to better provision their cloud infrastructure and enhance performance, all the while limiting factors that amount to a higher price tag.

The company currently offers two enterprise-grade products, Commitment Manager and Zesty Disk, to identify and eliminate hidden and underutilized resources. These advanced, purposebuilt solutions are designed to help organizations gain visibility in their cloud infrastructure and automatically improve resource allocation.

The Comprehensive Usage Manager

Zesty’s Commitment Manager is a gamechanger in empowering organizations to take advantage of the benefits rendered through Reserved Instances which provide deeper discounts and Savings Plans, and thus, greater flexibility to adjust across different sizes, families, operating systems, and regions. This cloud optimization tool puts AWS discount management on ‘autopilot,’ enabling clients to realize significant savings at maximum coverage and minimum risks.

Commitment Manager can be monitored on Zesty’s a compute explorer dashboard that gives users a bird’s eye view of all running instances, workloads, and reservations. Equipped with a robust data collection tool, the platform effectively combs through their usage behaviors and resource allocations in real-time. The usage metrics gleaned are fed into the ML prediction model to create usage patterns and forecast compute requirements ahead of time, informing clients when discount allocations need to be added or removed. In cases where workloads were to drop, Zesty would sell off or minimize those reservations in real time.

“Scaling up or down, Commitment Manager solution guarantees consistent high-cost efficiency by dynamically managing commitments,” says Melamedov. “Our platform enables clients to anticipate and make informed decisions right before the application changes, allowing them to stay one step ahead of user behavior.”

The Auto-Scaling Storage Solution

Zesty’s on-demand scaling capabilities also extend to Zesty Disk for managing the storage side of cloud infrastructure. This real-time auto-scaler can shrink and expand block storage filesystems in run time to keep storage costs low when there is minimal activity and ensure sufficient capacity when data ingestion levels are high. Zesty Disk enables the storage size to scale in line with dynamic and fluctuating application needs without any manual interventions.

Generally, the industry tends to use only 30% of the available storage, with excess provisioned “just in case”. Should an application run into insufficient storage space, it may cause downtime or data loss, with consequences to business continuity. This forces companies to accept the large cost of provisioned, but unused storage as the cost of doing business. Zesty Disk gives no leeway to application stability loopholes, ensuring clients can auto-extend AWS EBS volumes to accommodate demand spikes.

Security-first Approach to Cloud Resource Allocation

Whether it’s compute or storage optimization, Zesty’s platforms can effectively achieve the task without accessing an organization’s internal data. The solutions use the meta-data and usage metrics collected in real time to orchestrate resource allocation.

An instance that best exemplifies Zesty’s commitment to data security and privacy involves a company that had low Elastic MapReduce (EMR) workload utilization. The client had a varying workload with occasional high demand spikes, forcing them to set up an extensive petabyte-level storage allocation to manage these fluctuations. This over-provisioning, however, incurred high costs as they paid for storage capacity that remained vastly underutilized.

With Zesty Disk, the client efficiently scaled their EMR workloads using AWS’s native tools and procedures. The solution made it effortless to adjust resources allocated to EMR workloads based on the actual demand. This client was able to significantly improve storage utilization from 14 percent to more than 90 percent, resulting in thousands of dollars saved every month. The client remained the sole owner of all their data throughout the endeavor, illustrating Zesty’s capability to scale and shrink clients’ cloud infrastructure without uploading any data to third-party AI applications. The combination of advanced automation capabilities and the light touch in terms of architectural intrusiveness has gained a reputation among its client base.

Tokens of Success

Zesty’s products are designed for selfservice, allowing the users to utilize the platforms independently, free from the need for direct support. They can plug and play and uncover potential cost savings from the initial step. This user-centric business model has helped businesses of all sorts, from Fortune 500 companies to SMEs, who are cloud-first, -board, or -native. Particularly, the ones embarking on deploying ML-based solutions have gained massive benefits through Zesty’s improved infrastructure optimization capabilities and subsequent critical impact on the total cost of ownership.

"When Businesses And Their Compute Requirements Continually Shift And Unpredictable Workloads Outnumber The Predictable, Clients Find It Challenging To Achieve The Balance Where Expenses Are Kept Low While Maintaining Top-Notch Application Performance. This Complex Effort Surpasses Human Capabilities "

To put things into perspective, let’s consider a success involving an ML company developing training programs for autonomous vehicles. The client had efficiency challenges due to frequent ‘out of space’ errors, which disrupted the training process, preventing them from completing their ML model training. Given the larger scale of operations, this client often opted for over-provisioning, which only increased their cloud spending.

Our Platform Enables Clients To Anticipate And Make Informed Decisions Right Before The Application Changes, Allowing Them To Stay One Step Ahead Of User Behavior

Zesty stepped in with its autoscaling storage solution and helped enhance the completion rate of the training models. Its platform improved efficiency of the ML training cycles and simultaneously eliminated the need for any over-provisioned storage, enabling the client to reap higher savings in their infrastructure bill.

A Diverse Team to Support Dynamic Environments

The force behind Zesty’s continuous success is a multi-disciplinary team of industry veterans with deep expertise in configuring, managing, and maintaining extremely heavy-duty cloud infrastructures for the military. This expertise, in concert with a nurturing environment, enables Zesty to stay at the forefront of bringing new cloud cost optimization solutions into the market. The company takes a twopronged approach, which combines a data-driven analysis and periodic client feedback to stay ahead of market trends and technology adoption. This strategy empowers it to consistently develop and upgrade top-notch solutions.

In the days ahead, Zesty aims to diversify its solution portfolio to accommodate multi-cloud scenarios and hyper-scalers and is also investing in new capabilities related to Kubernetes. The roadmap clearly illustrates its drive to bring forth more flexible and efficient solutions that align with the industry’s rapid advancement.