Introduction:
IDC said spending on public cloud services would increase from $531.7 billion this year to $1.1 trillion by 2026. However, Exostellar as the use of cloud services grows, businesses need help to keep track of the precise amount of computing costs.
According to Statista, controlling cloud spend is currently a “significant” challenge for almost 82% of businesses. According to Flexera, self-estimated wasted cloud spending is down from 32% last year to 28% this year. Nevertheless, there is still a need to reduce waste and maximize efficiency, particularly given the increasing demand for compute-intensive technology like AI.
The difficulty in managing the cloud has spawned a new class of firms developing tools to monitor and manage computing costs. One spend-optimizing firm, Exostellar, today raised a $15 million Series A financing headed by Celesta and Cambium Capital with participation from Alpha Intelligence Capital, demonstrating the demand for such products.
The new tranche values Exostellar at $40 million, according to Tony Shakib, who was just named CEO.
Since businesses are concentrating on lowering the cost of cloud infrastructure, the overall technological slowdown has given Exostellar technology an even more fantastic opportunity, Shakib said TechCrunch in an email interview. The organization is, therefore, well-positioned to benefit from trends.
Exostellar, formerly Exotanium, is a company in Ithaca, New York. It was founded in 2018 by Cornell computer science professors Hakim Weatherspoon and Robbert van Renesse and Zhiming Shen, a former Ph.D. student and current Exostellar CTO.
Exostellar’s software tries to dynamically distribute and shift workloads between the least expensive cloud infrastructure in real-time. The application-agnostic software is made to cooperate with other well-liked resource management programs like Slurm.
Exotanium’s software, at a high level, keeps track of variables like the spot instance cost for a specific cloud provider — for now, only AWS — to forecast when the provider would terminate an instance. (Spot pricing offers a discount on computers in exchange for the chance that the ad will be transferred to another client as overall demand rises.) Exotanium temporarily switches the workload to a more expensive, standard-rate cloud instance when a spot instance shutdown appears imminent.
The software used by Exotanium also makes an effort to reduce the number of instances to a minimum viable number while automatically altering the instances’ size and power to match the workload.
Exostellar Raises $15M to Help Companies:
Exostellar Raises $15M to Help Companies [Source of Image : Techcrunch.com]
According to Shakib, Exostellar’s technology allows users to use more of their cloud infrastructure without raising their cloud spending, drastically decreasing the time to market for those users. Exostellar “empowers organizations to get the cheapest cloud pricing without long-term financial commitments by eliminating the trade-off between on-demand, reserved, and spot instance pricing.”
In the FinOps industry for cloud expenditure management, commonly known as FinOps, which is expected to expand from just under $1 billion this year to $2.75 billion by 2028, Exostellar is still with rivals.
Shakib named a few companies he believes to be competitors: Spot.io, owned by Netapp; Cast AI, CloudHealth from VMware; Apptio, nOps, and Zesty. Recently, Zesty secured $75 million for its AI-powered cloud storage and computing technology, while Cast AI received $20 million to expand and further develop its platform for optimizing cloud utilization.
Exostellar, whose clients include Astera Labs, Synopsys, and two U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) labs, Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory, plans to expand the use of its platform by adding support for GPU instances and bringing it to additional public cloud platforms like Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud. (Exostellar only supports CPU instances at this time.)
Shakib stated that although the epidemic presented difficulties, it also presented opportunities. Because most businesses now run online, there is an unprecedented demand for cloud application servers, which raises the need for Exostellar technology.
To support Shakib’s argument, according to a 2021 survey by Anodot, a firm offering cloud cost management and business monitoring, 91% of businesses have IT infrastructure in the cloud, and 50% want to migrate more workloads there. Exostellar has expansion prospects if rivals don’t stand in the way, as almost half of the respondents mentioned over-provisioning and dispersion of cloud assets among teams and suppliers as the reasons for their inefficient cloud spend.
In addition to its offices in Ithaca and Santa Clara, Exostellar has raised nearly $20 million to date, excluding the $2 million in funding it has received from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
