Cloud governance startup Stacklet Inc. today introduced Stacklet SaaS, a new software-as-a-service product aimed at helping companies operate their public cloud environments more efficiently.

The new service is a managed version of the startup’s flagship Stacklet Platform. The latter offering is based on a popular open-source tool called Cloud Custodian, which was created by Stacklet co-founder and chief technology officer Kapil Thangavelu. Cloud Custodian is used by thousands of organizations worldwide.

Stacklet has received $22 million in funding to date, most of which was raised last year through a Series A round by Addition. The startup disclosed at the time that Cloud Custodian, the open-source tool on which its software is based, was downloaded more than 2 million times between August 2020 and January 2021.

A company’s public cloud environment must meet a long list of technical requirements to operate reliably. To reduce the risk of a data breach, administrators must ensure that every workload encrypts the information it processes. To avoid cost overruns, a company has to prevent applications from provisioning more infrastructure than necessary. 

Overall, a large cloud environment may have to meet upwards of hundreds of technical requirements. Manually checking that every single requirement is being met often isn’t practical, which is why administrators create scripts to automate the task. But although scripts can automate much of the manual work involved in maintaining a cloud environment, they still take significant time and effort to use, which complicates administrators’ work.

Stacklet is working to streamline the task. Stacklet SaaS, the startup’s newly launched cloud service, allows administrators to replace the scripts they use to manage their cloud environments with a single, more convenient tool.

One of the main challenges involved in using scripts is that administrators often have to write them from scratch. Moreover, depending on the complexity of a company’s information technology infrastructure, the number of scripts that have to be written can be significant.

Stacklet SaaS provides pre-packaged features for managing cloud infrastructure that don’t require administrators to produce large amounts of complex code. The platform makes it possible to specify the best practices that a cloud environment should meet with relative ease, Stacklet says. Then, administrators can have the best practices automatically applied across their company’s infrastructure.

Stacklet SaaS also makes it easier to detect if any components of a cloud environment don’t meet the necessary technical requirements. 

Administrators can use the service to ensure that best practices related to cybersecurity are implemented correctly. For example, if a company requires that encryption keys be refreshed every week, Stacklet SaaS can detect if some applications only perform the task every two weeks. The service is also capable of spotting a variety of other cybersecurity flaws.

The features that allow Stacklet SaaS to detect cybersecurity flaws enable it to identify other types of issues as well. The service can highlight workloads that provision more cloud infrastructure than needed, which helps companies reduce hardware usage and thereby reduce cloud costs. Stacklet SaaS also makes it easier to implement cloud best practices that companies must follow to comply with industry-specific regulations. 

Because it’s delivered as a cloud service, Stacklet SaaS doesn’t require companies to manage any infrastructure. The service also automates a number of related maintenance tasks. By reducing the amount of manual work necessary to use its technology, Stacklet is lowering the entry barrier for potential customers, which should benefit its go-to-market efforts. 

Image: Stacklet