In the complex DevOps landscape, many companies are so focused on deploying product that they overlook valuable infrastructure allocation details that can affect their bottom line. Andrew Hillier (pictured), chief technical officer and co-founder of Cirba Inc. (doing business as Densify), explained how his company is helping others optimize their virtual computing resources from a cost and workload perspective.

“The core of what we do is analyze workload patterns. And it’s like playing a game of Tetris. It’s saying, ‘That workload is busy in the morning, and that one is busy at night.’ We combine them together and get a lot of efficiency. And nothing in the VMware product line does that. It really plugs in nicely with DRS and vROps, but there is confusion in the words people use,” said Hillier, referring to a number of similar sounding offerings that are fundamentally different than Densify. 

Hillier spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at this week’s VMworld in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

Correcting the under-utilization problem

Upon careful inspection infrastructure setups, often times there a number of ways in which the computing resources are not being utilized or configured in the most cost-effective manner, according to Hillier. This is much more of an issue in public cloud environments than with on-premises setups where operators have more insights into their resources, he added.

“Universally, in the cloud we find it’s just terrible because they rush everything to the cloud without having the maturity to optimize it. … There’s dead wood for starters, and that’s kind of a different problem in that it’s not they don’t know what they’re doing; it’s that they forgot them. There’s no process around that, there’s no ITSM [information technology service management] process that can turn these things off, so we find a lot of that. Then there’s stuff that’s not utilized well at all that you could just be running better because someone said, ‘I need an extra large’ and you never revisited,” Hillier said.

Often times companies are not paying attention to all the latest news and releases around their stack, which leads to another form of under-utilization, Hillier stated. Densify’s automated release notification engine allows them to create rules around when instances are upgraded.

Modernization is also a pressing issue the company is dealing with. “You look OK, but you’re on an old instance and there’s a newer one that’s a lot cheaper. You’re on an R3, but you could be on an R4 in Amazon … it’s because people deploy an app six months ago or a year ago and it still looks great, but they don’t have the ability to analyze and use benchmarks that say you have a new instance that’s as powerful as that one but cheaper,” Hillier concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Densify have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE