In many enterprises today, DevOps staff and cloud architects are moving at light speed. They want things done at the point of coding and in the continuous integration pipeline in hours not weeks.

When technology collides with security postures and other demands that hinder rapid cloud development, the IT operational process slows down, disconnects arise, and the tension becomes real.

To address this situation, MontyCloud Inc. has developed a solution to transform what are known as Day 2 operations, the monitoring, maintenance and troubleshooting required to keep IT infrastructure up and running smoothly.

Using bots, automation in app context and no-code cloud operations, the startup helps enterprises efficiently manage and operate cloud environments.

“The operations burden is what gets IT departments; we’ve seen that happen repeatedly,” said Venkat Krishnamachari (pictured, right), co-founder and chief executive officer of MontyCloud. “Our platform solves that problem with an automation approach. We have capabilities that help customers provision a set of governance contracts and drive consumption in the right way.”

Krishnamachari spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. He was joined in the interview by Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy (pictured, left), solutions architect in the Research Computing Group at Saint Louis University, and they discussed how MontyCloud helps enable data-intensive research, providing extensive cloud governance through automated solutions, and the reasons why some companies are more successful than others in digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

The right capabilities

At Saint Louis University, the school’s IT platform is geared toward enabling extensive research. The goal of the Research Computing Group is to help university scholars by providing the right infrastructure and computing capabilities.

“The Saint Louis University research portfolio is quite diverse,” Murthy explained. “We do research in vaccines, economics, geospatial intelligence and many other interesting areas. It involves really large data sets, and one of the Research Computing Group’s ambitious plans is to move many high-end computation applications from on-prem to AWS.”

As part of these plans, Murthy’s team found a need for MontyCloud’s automation platform to support researchers in a quest to deliver projects in a timely and cost-efficient manner. For the school’s Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research, this meant converting daily ingests of sensitive de-identified geodata from various sources into workable formats for analysis.

“Doing this at large scale has many challenges,” Murthy said. “We had to deploy compute-heavy instances, such as AWS r5.12xlarge. After automating most of the efforts with MontyCloud, we were able to bring down the data processing time from two weeks or more to three days, which really helped the researchers.”

A seasoned architect

Murthy’s example points to a key rationale for the MontyCloud solution. Cloud resources need support and operational integration to work effectively, and automation is increasingly becoming the solution of choice given the size and scale of IT today.

“We have to do a better job not only of solving the traditional problems and making them simple, but also for the modern work culture of integrations,” Krishnamachari noted. “For solutions architects such as Shruthi, their role is to help get out of the way of the researchers yet be ubiquitous around delivering cloud solutions. Our platform acts like a seasoned cloud architect.”

Another key reason for automated cloud governance is change. Enterprises are building bespoke operations tailored for specific business needs, and the cloud offers a nearly infinite set of resources that are continually being mined by developers and others in the organization.

“Customers are trying to build their own operating model, they’re writing custom code, and there’s a lot of need for provisioning governance, security, compliance and monitoring,” Krishnamachari said. “It’s not uncommon for one of the developers or one of the projects to consume a brand-new resource. Suddenly, you’re not keeping up with that service.”

As a startup pursuing a hot market with an innovative solution, MontyCloud is in a position to see how businesses are positioning for digital transformation. This includes observing what works and what doesn’t.

“One of the things we are seeing in companies that do well is the leadership decides the top business objectives and KPIs, and they want the software and services in the cloud division to support those objectives,” Krishnamachari said. “When they take that approach, transformation happens, but it is a lot more easier said than done.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. (* Disclosure: MontyCloud Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither MontyCloud nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE