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Everything gets an Ops. In enterprise technology, if there’s an opportunity to put an Ops-for-operations tag on the end of another technology term, then we generally go for it. The once unloved operations department (typically consisting of everyone from database administrators to site reliability engineers to penetration testers to plain old sysadmins and so on) has been elevated to star status in recent years, largely of course thanks to the DevOps moment (the portmanteau coming together of developers and operations, obviously) and the need for a bit more equality and inclusion in the workplace as a whole.
Taking its name from an as-yet-unowned but ripe for plundering Ops extension, ScaleOps is not a specialist in application or data service scaling from an operations team foundation as such. The Tel Aviv-based startup says it is on a mission to automate the wider management of cloud environments (with some functions inevitably related to scaling) to enable organizations to reduce cloud costs.
What is cloud resource orchestration?
Now working to explain how its approach to cloud resource management works, the company recently announced the release of its first fully-automated cloud-native resource orchestration platform. But what does cloud resource orchestration actually mean?
In terms of operation, resource orchestration might include tasks that come about because cloud-native environments (often making use of the Kubernetes cloud container orchestration platform) become increasingly dynamic and interconnected, which makes them highly complex and potentially quite tedious to manage.
According to Yodar Shafrir, ScaleOps' co-founder and CEO, Kubernetes’ native container sizing, scaling thresholds and node type selection use static configurations, but consumption and demand are highly dynamic. Software application development engineers (who should be programming) can find themselves spending their precious time manually adjusting cloud resources to meet fluctuating demand, trying to avoid underprovisioning or overprovisioning.
Because underprovisioning leaves systems scant of resources resulting in poor application performance issues during peak demand and overprovisioning is wasteful and expensive, we don’t want either end of the spectrum to actually come to reality in the world of cloud resource management.
Context-aware optimization
“In production environments, each [cloud] container requires a different scaling strategy,” said CEO Shafrir. “Experienced [software] engineers spend hours trying to predict demand, running load tests and tweaking configuration files for every single container. It’s impossible to manage this at scale. We realized there’s a huge need for a context-aware platform that can optimize these constantly-changing environments automatically, adapting to changes in demand in real-time.”
ScaleOps is a fully-automated platform. It continuously optimizes and manages cloud-native resources during runtime i.e. when applications are actually executing and working. The platform can be installed in two minutes on any cloud provider, on-premises and in air-gapped environments. The technology is designed to ensure application scaling matches real-time demand. Instead of static allocations, it allocates resources dynamically, automatically rightsizing containers based on application needs. The platform also ensures every container runs in the most suitable node type.
“The only way to free engineers from ongoing, repetitive configurations and allow them to focus on what truly matters is by completely automating resource management down to the smallest building block: the single container,” added Shafrir. “By employing AI, the ScaleOps platform is context-aware and autonomously handles resource management for engineers, lowering infrastructure costs and delivering better performance.”
Co-founded by Yodar Shafrir (CEO) and Guy Baron (CTO) in 2022, ScaleOps manages the production environments of companies including Wiz, PayU, Orca Security, At-Bay, RTL, OutBrain, Salt Security and Noname Security plus others.
Clarifying the cloud dream
We hear a lot about how cloud computing makes our life simpler - and that message is repeated not just for users, but it is also presented as a means of enabling the software engineering team to have a happier time and get what people like to call a better User eXperience (UX) across all tasks and workflows. That’s the promise, but we also hear a lot about cloud complexity and the management headaches that software engineers have in this space. Being able to orchestrate base layers of cloud to make sure that we have enough gas in the tank ought to be a given, but sometimes it’s clearly not, which is why companies like ScaleOps emerge.
In truth, the name ScaleOps does adhere to the same portmanteau-powered concept championed by DevSecOps, FinOps, MLOps, APIOps and of course NoOps - it’s just not quite a de facto industry term on its own, yet… so watch this space.
