By CIOReview, Originally posted on CIOReview.com
Cloud services have been at the forefront of the pandemic-induced digital economy, forcing enterpris
es to re-imagine their business models, products, and services. Agile and resilient enterprises are relying on the cloud to adapt, innovate, become data-driven, and thrive in these challenging times. Apart from
environmental proactivity and virtual services, the promise of the cloud is its strength and adaptability that expands as usage increases. On the flip side, the expandability of the cloud brings with it the added challenge of managing the scaling costs upon consumption. Organizations waste an average of about
35 percent of their cloud spends and the increased dependence on the cloud has also led to skyrocketing costs, leaving companies with the dire need for cloud cost optimization.
Addressing this problem is Exostellar, a cloud resource optimization and management platform that uses cutting-edge distributed container infrastructure as well as AI and ML to help enterprises reduce spending in the cloud by up to 90 percent. The company is dedicated to developing affordable cloud computing technology that empowers enterprises with a finer level of control over their cloud computing resources while enhancing both operational security and performance.
“Exostellar allows its users to start their application in one cloud environment and live-migrate it to another cloud; in particular, a company can start an application in a cheap but unreliable cloud environment and live migrate the application to a reliable but more expensive environment. This enables the cloud user to dictate how they consume the cloud by making efficient usage of the resources but at the same time greatly reducing the spend,” says Hakim Weatherspoon, Co-Founder, and CEO of Exostellar, on the company’s competitive edge in the market.
The company was founded in 2019 by Hakim Weatherspoon, Robbert van Renesse, and Zhiming Shen initially to break vendor lock-in. The technological inputs for the inception of the company is based on co-founder Shen’s PhD thesis at Cornell University, where Weatherspoon and van Renesse were professors. The high-performance application agnostic solution, patented by the University, enables heavy-duty virtual machine live migration without access to the underlying cloud.
With around ten years of research backing, the commercial viability of the technology was explored after winning a business innovation research grant from National Science Foundation (NSF). As the name suggests, Exostellar was conceived as a security company offering ‘exo’ protection as strong as titanium metal.
However, the first rounds of commercial prototypes and customer discovery revealed a demand in the market for optimization, which pivoted the course of the technological solutions the company offers.
The company’s product portfolio, which includes X-Spot, is based on technology that consolidates idle workloads and oversized containers, allowing users to benefit from drastically cheaper server space, such as the AWS Spot market. One of Exostellar’s clients, a Fortune 1000 company in the computer-aided design industry, successfully used xSpot to transparently migrate their stateful, long-running legacy applications (container size of 32 CPU and 128 GB memory), without any service interruptions. This helped the client with 60 percent cost savings and virtually no performance penalty; i.e. the application was always available and responsive as normal
With 20 to 30 billion dollars wasted on idle and wrong-sized virtual machines, Exostellar believes in improving cloud cost optimization for all. The company also has a grander vision for migrating to the cloud and controlling one’s destiny using the cloud via giving greater control to the user. “We are working on allowing users to have their own virtual infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud
without owning the underlying machines. This will enable people to consume the cloud the way they want independent of the cloud provider controlling for performance, cost or usage,” concludes Weatherspoon on the vision ahead for the company.
