Serra Labs, Inc.

A major problem faced by most cloud customers is that cloud costs continue to increase unabated. It is very difficult to know how to reduce costs without affecting key customer application performance. While there are solutions that help cut cloud costs of a customer, they simply ignore adverse effects on cloud application performance. Solutions that focus on customer cloud performance management on the other hand ignore the cost increases, so much so that costs become prohibitive.

Serra Labs, Inc. is a cloud resource optimization company. Unlike cost-focused and performance-focused solutions, it not only reduces cloud costs or improves cloud performance, but it is able to simultaneously optimize cost and performance — reducing costs without degrading performance and improving performance without increasing costs.

Serra Labs has developed its SaaS product, Cost-Performance Optimizer (CPO), using ML techniques so that its optimization is not just based on analysis of historical data but on their expected future trends. In addition, the product relies on innovative load simulation techniques to validate expected cost and performance with resized and relocated resources before they actually resizing and relocating.

CPO is offered to its customers as a subscription. It is priced on a per resource basis so that cost savings as well as performance improvements can be realized on an ongoing basis in a cost-effective manner. To help customers get familiar with CPO, a free plan is available via https://cpo.serralabs.com.

CPO, being SaaS, only requires read access to a customer’s resource inventory and utilization and health data just like a typical agent-less cloud monitoring tool would require. No software agents or such need to be installed in the customer deployment. The CPO dashboard can be accessed from anywhere and APIs are available to retrieve analysis and recommendation as well as manage resizing and relocation.

For a given cloud resource type (such as Virtual Machine, Database, App Services, Kubernetes cluster), CPO retrieves and analyzes historical data as well as understand its future data to produce three types of recommendations – economical, balanced, and enhanced. On the one end, economical recommendation is driven by the need to reduce costs as much as possible without concern for performance degradations that may result. On the other end, enhanced recommendation is driven by the need to improve performance even at the expense of increased costs. In between the two, the balanced recommendation focuses on reducing or maintaining costs while maintaining or improving performance.

CPO provides the ability to validate the effect of recommendation through its ability to run load simulation using actual data using resized resources per recommendation. This allows the customer to know if a recommendation will have the expected effect on cost and performance, thus allowing the customer to choose a different recommendation or customize it.

CPO also includes the ability to park active resources (such as virtual machines) if they have periodicity to their use which it determines automatically. This way the active resources can be shut down during the times or days when they are inactive and brought back up when they ought to be up and running.

To conclude, Serra Labs was founded in 2019 in Silicon Valley. The company consists of passionate and experienced business and technical specialists, driven to deliver world-class cloud resource optimization solutions to cloud customers everywhere so that they are able to get the most performance for the least amount of money spent in the cloud.