During day three of AWS re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas, John Furrier, the Founder of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE host, welcomed Jonathan Chu (CEO) and Jordan Potter (COO) from Koality, an early stage start-up which launched at a recent TechCrunch event.

“Koality is a cloud automation testing solution that help the companies run the automation test extraordinarily quickly, and the goal is to maximize engineering efficiency because, especially in the Valley, engineers are very expensive and they are the core of the company; they get the work done very quickly,” explained Chu. “The faster they can get out code, the better.” Using the Koality platform for software testing, enterprises can increase their engineers’ productivity. The platform decreases the time needed to test software changes, letting engineers spend more time coding and less time waiting to validate the changes.

It’s Furrier’s opinion that people are the core asset of a company. “The open source is free, so the code is free, the cloud is getting there, so all that remains is the people,” added Furrier. Chu agrees: “If you can make your engineers much more effective, that’s actually dollars being banked right here.”

Overview and value proposition

As always, Furrier pressed his guests to elaborate on their business model, asking for “a quick overview of the product,” and an explanation of the value proposition. “Why would someone contact you?’

All companies rely heavily on their engineers, but long test suites and broken builds can hinder the progress of the engineering team. Koality solves the common inefficiencies in the development process, helping engineers achieve on-time releases. Koality’s elastic parallelization runs the tests across the cloud “increasing the speed by 10, 20, 100 times,” as Potter boasted.

It helps that right now the computation is so ubiquitous and so cheap, and servers like Amazon EC2 make possible all sorts of things that were previously inaccessible. “We can actually verify code before it goes into the code base, so no bad code can go in,” said Potter.

Furrier simplified the concept to anyone’s understanding: “You basically accelerate the identification of bugs. What’s the secret sauce?” asked he, presenting some very predictible options: machine learning, math, and algorithms.

“It’s the great distributive systems, the operating systems and also utilizing AWS and EC2 very effectively, and helping manage that particular cloud,” replied Chu. Koality is an integration platform which automatically parallelizes the test suites across available virtual machines, prevents broken builds, works behind a firewall and optimizes spin-up and teardown of the VMs for maximum price efficiency.

Not surprisingly, Koality has been selected by Amazon as one of the five AWS-powered start-ups to “reinvent” the cloud services. The AWS products used include Amazon EC2, Route 53, ELB, S3 and RDS. The developer community loves Amazon because it’s fast, low cost, and maximises engineering efficiency.

Scaling when you need it

For one of their customers, a large file sharing client, Koality is managing up to 200 EC2 instances on Amazon, simultaneously. “When you are not using them, it automatically scales back down,” explained Chu. “Definitely catering to the Amazon philosophy of ‘computation when you need it’,” added Potter.