Cloud infrastructure providers offer a range of prices for their services, including aggressively priced virtual machines available in the cash market, depending on their availability. The problem is that the provider can stop these virtual machines as soon as they need them. Spotinst, a start-up based in Tel Aviv, has developed a service to buy and distribute this excess capacity available.
Today, the company has announced that it offers this same type of service for serverless computing services like AWS Lambda, which only charges you when a trigger event occurs. They call this function as a service and target types of IoT applications.
This means that you do not pay to have a server available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but only when your application requires it. Spotinst claims to be able to provide event-driven computing resources at a lower price than larger providers using the same available server capacity.
Although this excess capacity is cheap, it does not accompany any type of service level agreement. Spotinst uses its know-how to give you this cash price with a service level contract.
No matter how you buy your infrastructure services, you can rightly wonder if Spotinst can get this extra capacity, why can not anyone? Well, the answer is that they could, but because this computing is volatile, Spotinst does more than just deliver the service. He has algorithms that work behind the scenes to understand how the cloud service capacity is being used. This helps to understand when this ability disappears and when it needs to move your workloads to another set of available resources.
It's not easy to do and it's something that people will pay for. In fact, the company is only 2.5 years old, but I have amassed more than $ 17 million and I have more than 1,000 customers. According to Amiram Shachar, founder and CEO of the company, Spotinst was profitable after only six months of business.
Until recently, the company remained with the big three – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – but turning to a product without a server, it forged partnerships with Alibaba, IBM and Equinix, offering customers a wide range of choices. If, by chance, this customer wants capacity from a certain vendor in a specific country or region, Spotinst can also support that type of request, though the cost of delivery increases when you chain them together. requirements.
They had some success with VMs and containers using this approach, and now they want to try computer without a server. Shachar believes that it is the next logical step.
"We saw a great opportunity to get better rates on the network and hardware, and we started transferring AWS customers to other nearby data centers. 39; AWS who have a service function, "says Shachar.
Hotel Image: dem10 / Getty Images