Startup YotaScale Says Automation Is 'The Future Of Cloud Ops'

YotaScale, a cloud management provider, is using artificial intelligence to help businesses automate their cloud environments, and the provider sees a great opportunity for the channel to help customers get the most out of the cloud.

Many businesses are relying on public cloud to run critical applications, but poor management and lack of visibility into these environments often translates to complex cloud operations and unexpectedly high costs. To help businesses win the battle, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company announced the general availability of its AI-injected cloud management platform that is focused on Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments on Wednesday.

"Our firm belief is this is the future of autonomous cloud operations -- optimizing workloads, providing governance, and simplifying operations," said Asim Razzaq, YotaScale's CEO.

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YotaSale was founded in 2015 by three longtime tech executives. The company's deep bench of cloud computing talent is being led by Razzaq, formerly with PayPal and ebay, as well as Imran Moin, who worked for Google and Blue Jeans, and Usman Abbasi, from Google and PayPal. The company has raised $11.6 million in funding to date.

When it comes to cloud management, customers need visibility, optimization, planning, and automation, said Razzaq, who serves as YotaScale's CEO. Enterprises typically have more than 25 tools for managing cost, performance and availability of their cloud workloads. And at the same time, these companies spend 30 percent of their cloud operations time on manual tasks that could be automated.

Many cloud management tools today are "stuck in phase one or two," Razzaq said, but customers need a system that understands each parameter in play. YotaScale's cloud management platform works by first detecting issues, then diagnosing the problem, followed by suggesting a fix for the issue, and finally, using AI to predict future incidents.

For the past three years, YotaScale's platform has only grown more powerful as the company access to cloud data has increased. Today, the platform's proprietary AI models have trained on more than 502 petabytes of data, which allows it to deliver about 85 percent accuracy, the founders said.

While YotaScale is in the early days of forming partner relationships, cloud automation is an area in which the channel can add value, said Imran Moin, co-founder and chief product officer for YotaScale.

"Partners can take the YotaScale platform and leverage all the insights and put a professional services wrapper around it," he said.

While YotaScale's platform is geared toward AWS, the company plans on rolling out solutions for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, the founders said.

"We absolutely want to be multi-cloud, because that's where our customers are going, and help them maximize cost, performance, and availability of that workload,” Moin said.

YotaScale on Wednesday also announced a recent round of Series A funding. At the same time, the company revealed several of its well-known customers, including Expedia, ProtectWise, and AdRoll.