- CMPUTE.IO needed a highly available and elastic cloud platform to handle peaks in service demand
- The company is running its software as a service (SaaS) product on AWS
- Reduced server costs by 75 percent
- Enabled its customers to lower their Amazon EC2 costs by 90 percent
- Delivers high availability and scalability to ensure excellent customer service
Start-up software company CMPUTE.IO was established in India in 2014 by cofounders Paddy Raghavan, Jags Raghavan, and Praveen A. The company’s CMPUTE.IO solution balances Amazon Web Services (AWS) workloads over on-demand, spot, and reserved instances without compromising application availability and uptime. Today, CMPUTE.IO is doubling in size each year, and an increasing number of customers are using the platform to increase the efficiency of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances while optimizing their applications’ uptime and availability.
IT cost is one of the most important challenges a tech startup faces. Like with all startups, overheads can break the business and IT has the potential to be a significant upfront cost if a company chooses an on-premises solution. In the case of CMPUTE.IO, the startup company sought a pay-as-you-go IT infrastructure that avoided as much outlay upfront as possible. Furthermore, CMPUTE.IO also wanted a platform that was highly available and elastic, enabling the business to handle peaks in service demand.
The company planned to launch its CMPUTE.IO solution, which enables businesses to get more value out of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. The AWS service enables businesses to name their price for Amazon EC2 instances. If a company’s bid is higher than the instances market price, the instances belong to that company until the market price reaches or exceeds the bid price, after which, the instances the company had are gone. “We started CMPUTE.IO knowing that we could make computing much more cost effective for businesses through Amazon EC2 Spot Instances,” says Paddy Raghavan, cofounder of CMPUTE.IO. “Key for us, however, was to use a cloud platform for our solution that delivered cost effectiveness, elasticity, and high availability.”
Paddy and his team looked for a cloud service to support the CMPUTE.IO solution. Paddy and colleagues at CMPUTE.IO had worked with AWS before and were keen to use the AWS Cloud. “All of us have a lot of experience with the pay-as-you-go AWS model. What’s more, we had seen the elasticity and high availability of the AWS Cloud.”
The team built the CMPUTE.IO solution as a highly available software as a service (SaaS) product running on a classic SaaS AWS platform across multiple Availability Zones in multiple regions. It leverages key AWS services such as Amazon EC2 for compute, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for inexpensive data storage, and Amazon CloudFront for fast content delivery. “We are making use of everything that AWS offers to make our platform reliable and of high performance,” says Paddy.
The CMPUTE.IO platform has pre-built integrations with different AWS services that makes using the platform deceptively simple. The platform analyzes a customer’s application and decides to provision a combination of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances, and Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Once an Amazon EC2 Spot Instance is engaged, CMPUTE.IO monitors the instance and automatically moves the application to another instance if it looks like the first is about to be terminated. The new instance may be in another Availability Zone and may be a different type of compute resource, such as an Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instance. “The point is that customers ensure their applications stay highly available while making significant cost savings on their Amazon EC2 Instances,” says Paddy.
By working with AWS, CMPUTE.IO gained a pay-as-you-go IT platform that helped the company avoid any significant upfront costs. Paddy says, “With AWS, we pay only for the individual services we need and avoid the capital costs of an on-premises infrastructure. In addition, AWS has developed a variety of types within its services to meet the specific needs of customers. We have reduced our server costs by 75 percent because we use Amazon EC2 instances that meet our specific use cases.”
CMPUTE.IO—which is growing at 100 percent a year—has also found a platform that offers high levels of availability and elasticity to handle expansion and peaks in service demand. “The AWS Cloud delivers the stability for us to serve our customers well. Furthermore, it provides the elasticity we require to scale up and scale down thousands of Amazon EC2 instance types in a matter of hours.”
Customers using the CMPUTE.IO solution are also achieving significant benefits. “We are helping customers reduce their compute costs by 90% through optimizing the use of Amazon EC2 Spot instances,” comments Paddy.
It’s an exciting time for Paddy and the rest of the team at CMPUTE.IO as more companies see the advantage of cloud computing with AWS. Paddy says, “AWS is adding value to its services all the time. The perfect example is AWS Spot instances, and we want companies to use these services as efficiently as possible.”
With AWS launching new AWS Availability Zones around the world, CMPUTE.IO is aiming at new markets. The company plans to target businesses that must keep their data in the same country as where they operate and haven’t been able to use AWS up to now for the lack of a local AWS Availability Zone. As Paddy makes clear, some organizations have to keep their data in the country where they reside, restricting their use of AWS regions. The growth in AWS regions will increase the number of companies that can use AWS services and those of CMPUTE.IO. Paddy says, “We have seen that AWS is a game changer for many businesses. Through CMPUTE.IO, companies can make that change even better.”
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