At times, enterprises find themselves between a rock and a hard place when devising ways to minimize costs in the cloud.

Since there are many ways to commit to a cloud workload, Archera.ai Inc. tackles the cloud pricing pain point through a two-way door approach, automating commitment management and using forecast powered by artificial intelligence, according to Aran Khanna (pictured, left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Archera.

“What we do at Archera is provide the tools to not only look at all the different commitment types and build an AI-driven forecast of our customer’s workloads, but then come up with a set of blended default strategies, including our 30-day [Guaranteed Reserved Instances],” Khanna said. “We wanted to create a bit of a new model as you referenced with a free single platform that acts as a replacement for those native AWS and other cloud providers free tools, and fill the gaps in their offerings with a low floor, high ceiling type of approach.”

Khanna and Steve Baer (right), senior site reliability engineer at Kemet Financial Technologies Inc., spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin at the “Analytics and Cost Optimization” AWS Startup Showcase event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Archera enables businesses, such as Kemet Trading, to minimize costs in the cloud for better outcomes. (* Disclosure below.)

Viewing cloud spend through a single pane of glass

As a financial technology provider dealing with digital asset derivatives, Kemet Trading selected Archera through the AWS Partner Network based on easy onboarding and no costs to get started. As a result, it is able to view its cloud cost optimization journey through a single pane of glass, according to Baer.

“I think with the ease of the onboarding process, getting up and just bringing visibility to these things, the value prop for the initial input is extreme,” he stated. “That’s even if it’s just a free offering at that point. So even if you aren’t taking advantage of the whole suite of things that Archera is bringing to the table, just beginning to frame and have that single pane of glass that you can begin to interrogate these things throughout your cloud estate is critical.”

Archera helps Kemet Trading have finer details of its cloud spend for better productivity. As a result, Kemet Trading is able to move fast and meet client expectations despite the current macroeconomic conditions, Baer pointed out.

“We get initial price breaks on our ECS based workloads in Fargate,” he said. “Whether we move further into cloud-native technologies or more into the host base, more traditional VM-based technologies, no matter which way we grow and mature our architecture, we can keep cost at the front of our consideration.”

For engineering and DevOps teams to achieve big savings, Archera provides them with an easy interface and innovative features, such as smart alerting and reporting. Data from disparate places, such as AWS Pricing Calculator, Trusted Advisor and Compute Optimizer, is also brought into one place, according to Khanna.

“We essentially will help customers on the engineering side integrate things like the scenario forecasting into their workflows,” he stated. “That’s really the way that we think about bringing that kind of disparate set of information at the fingertips of DevOps users, and they always want to do the right thing — the engineers, the DevOps users. It’s just about making it easy for them.”

The two-way door approach

Using a unique approach called the two-way door strategy when managing cloud costs, Archera resets the price floor by not including parameters, such as the savings or spend percentage. This approach also automates DevOps and engineering workflows for enhanced cost saving, Khanna pointed out.

”I think one of the things that we’re pioneering is a true two-way door in the cost management space from a vendor perspective,” he said. “It gives them access to more advanced strategies like using GRIs, custom BI and reporting dashboards that they can opt-in to pay a flat sort of SaaS rate based on our costs, not based on their spend or savings. Instead of providing just visibility, we want to provide automation, we want to provide more integration with DevOps workflows and eventually have this 24/7 FinOps, AI co-pilot.”

Customer centricity is at the heart of the two-way door approach. As a result, the low-floor and high-ceiling viewpoints are incorporated for optimal cost and time saving, Khanna pointed out.

“One of the key ways that we’ve tried to go to market is to be really customer obsessed,” he noted. “There’s no one-way door; it’s all two-way doors. One of the key things that we found that customers really like is the fact that we actually have a new solution that fills the gaps between on demand one-year and three-year commitments … not just compute, but things like SageMaker as well, for as short as 30 days.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Analytics and Cost Optimization” AWS Startup Showcase event:

 (* Disclosure: Archera.ai Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Archera nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE