New Solution Offers Continuous Management and Reduction of Costs While Reducing the Manual Toil of Traditional Cost Management for Platform and FinOps Teams

Rafay Systems, the leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider for modern infrastructure and accelerated computing, today unveiled its Cost Optimization Suite, to address the urgent challenge of balancing modernization with the need to control infrastructure and operational costs in increasingly complex cloud and on-premises environments. The Cost Optimization Suite proactively reduces costs rather than just reporting them — it continuously analyzes spending patterns and automatically adjusts resources, eliminating repetitive manual intervention. It empowers platform and FinOps teams to focus on strategic initiatives instead of constant cost management by directly optimizing Kubernetes, AI and cloud resources in real time. Rafay customers report savings of up to 60% when using the Cost Optimization Suite.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240813126696/en/

The Rafay Cost Optimization Suite (Graphic: Business Wire)

Today, Rafay also published its inaugural “Pulse of Enterprise Platform Teams: Cloud, Kubernetes and AI” research study, which focuses on the confluence of cloud, Kubernetes and AI in enterprises. This report underscores the need for offerings such as Rafay’s Cost Optimization Suite. Among other major takeaways, the report reveals that the total cost of ownership for Kubernetes (including software/support licenses, salaries of resources) is higher than budgeted for/anticipated for almost a third of organizations (30.8%). Moreover, nearly half of organizations (44.5%) cite managing cost visibility and controlling Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure costs as their top challenge.

“No enterprise wants to constantly monitor cloud costs and have operations engineers intervene manually. They want applications to only use the resources they need and they want unused infrastructure to be scaled down if it's not being used,” said Haseeb Budhani, CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems. “Our Cost Optimization Suite does exactly this for Kubernetes environments by proactively making adjustments to per-application resource commits and ensuring that the right policies are in effect to automatically reduce infrastructure footprint based on need.”

Equipping FinOps and Platform Teams With a Multi-faceted Approach to Controlling Expenses and Reducing Waste

By automating cost management processes, Rafay enables platform and FinOps teams, and IT leadership to align cloud modernization with the industry-wide cost reduction trends, while ensuring the efficient use of cloud resources without constant manual intervention.

The benefits extend beyond immediate cost savings, offering improved visibility into cloud expense growth, reduced carbon footprint and greater control over infrastructure expenses as investments in AI/ML workloads accelerate. This automated approach allows organizations to reinvest in initiatives including driving business growth and enhancing customer experience, while maintaining better control over cloud spending without the burden of manual cost management.

“Managing cloud costs in the modern era shouldn't take a tremendous amount of manual work,” said Mohan Atreya, chief product officer at Rafay Systems. “With this new innovation, we're helping to create an efficient, self-optimizing cloud environment for businesses that delivers immediate and ongoing cost savings for CPU- and GPU-based workloads.”

The Rafay Cost Optimization Suite offers more than simple cost tracking, addressing significant gaps in cloud cost management through comprehensive automation. It delivers the following capabilities:

  • Automatically monitor, rightsize and reduce overprovisioning: Optimize cloud cost by detecting and fixing resource allocation issues through intelligent policy-driven controls for workload management. This ensures Kubernetes and cloud resources are rightsized for better application utilization, performance and cost efficiency.
  • Eliminate zombie cloud resources and environments: Implement automatic detection and cleanup of unused cloud environments. Organizations can also automatically enforce policies to ensure that resources provisioned for short term needs are freed after preset time-to-live (TTL) limits.
  • Enforce policies to control when and how environments run: Create schedule policies to ensure persistent cloud resources only run when needed (e.g., during weekdays). Policy limits can be set to restrict the number of environments teams can create simultaneously.
  • Optimize cloud resource sharing: Improved sharing of cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure allows multiple teams or applications to utilize the same cluster resources, reducing the need for separate clusters and thereby lowering overall cloud costs by as much as 30%. This efficient resource utilization maximizes cost savings by minimizing redundancy and reducing software add-on licensing costs.
  • Track historical consumption by workloads and teams: Simplify chargeback and showback for multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters, enabling efficient cost tracking and allocation. Comprehensive tools and insights for managing usage provide financial accountability for teams that share resources.

According to 2024 Gartner® How to Effectively Prioritize Your Cost Optimization Initiatives, “75% of leaders who believe optimizing costs is critical to their team’s success find it difficult or extremely difficult to reduce costs without negatively impacting business performance.” As per another Gartner report, Control Cloud Costs With a FinOps Approach, “As organizations’ use of cloud grows, the ability to monitor and manage resources often fails to keep pace,” said Ken Rothenberger, senior director advisor and David Wright, research director at Gartner.

The Cost Optimization Suite addresses ever increasing cloud spend and cloud leader requirements by automating cost optimization and management, minimizing the manual toil that’s typically required by platform and FinOps teams for traditional cost control methods. Rafay's offerings are already yielding significant cost reduction benefits for customers. A leading commercial real estate company achieved a 63% reduction in infrastructure costs by leveraging Rafay.

The Rafay Cost Optimization Suite is now generally available. The new solution, available as SaaS or self-hosted, applies to any public or private cloud and any Kubernetes distribution, offering versatile and flexible cost optimization across diverse environments.

For more information or to start a free trial, visit www.rafay.co

Additional Resources

  • Sign up for a demo of Rafay’s enterprise PaaS for modern infrastructure here
  • Download a complimentary copy of Rafay’s full survey report here
  • Follow Rafay on X and LinkedIn
  • Read the Rafay Blog: The Kubernetes Current

About Rafay Systems

Rafay’s mission is to liberate enterprises from the pains and complexities of consuming modern compute infrastructure, allowing them to channel 100% of their developers’ focus into innovation. Companies such as MoneyGram, Guardant Health and MassMutual entrust Rafay to be the cornerstone of their modern infrastructure strategy and AI architecture. With Rafay, platform teams at these companies enable developers and data scientists to access compute and AI resources in record time, complete with essential guardrails for security and governance. Gartner has recognized Rafay as a Cool Vendor in Container Management and GigaOm named Rafay as a Leader and Outperformer in the GigaOm Radar Report for Managed Kubernetes, acknowledging our commitment to driving innovation. To join the ranks of industry leaders who have unlocked the true potential of cloud-native computing with Rafay Systems, please visit www.rafay.co.

Audrey Briers Bhava Communications for Rafay rafay@bhavacom.com 858-522-0898