Cloudthread - Easy cloud cost management
Reduce cloud bills, save hours of engineering time and prevent costly re-architectures
I discover a new startup every week and share it with you. This week’s featured startup is Cloudthread. Subscribe to get each and every issue.
What it does: Cloudthread is an analytics platform that helps engineering teams reduce their spend on cloud hosting resources. It provides deep level unit cost analytics (cost per query, cost per request) to unlock cost efficiency without development disruption.
How it started: Daniele Packard (CEO), Ilia Semenov (CPO) and Thomas Yopes (CTO) were building cloud cost management systems at big companies like EA and Lyft and now want to use that deep expertise to bring those tools to every engineering team. They realized that many companies still do not have cloud cost management practices in place (causing extra spend), and those that do mostly take advantage of discounting mechanisms that cloud providers have (no optimal savings), while only few invest heavily in optimization building sophisticated cost management systems (optimal savings, but costly and time-intensive to set up).
How it works: Cloudthread integrates with your APM platforms (such as New
Relic & AppDynamics) and sends alerts to your Slack channels to make cloud cost analytics easily accessible to the engineering team. This allows engineering leaders to figure out their spend on a unit economic level to figure out costs per query or per request and keep an eye on spiking or extraordinary events.
Why it’s interesting: Keeping track of cloud spend is extraordinarily difficult for engineering teams because it is almost like a full-time job to figure out how all the cloud components are priced based on usage and where to find additional savings. In previous teams I have had to hire expensive consultants to figure it out and those were usually one-time fixes and cost savings, meaning as we kept building we eventually ended up in the same opaque situation. On smaller teams, engineering teams oftentimes misconfigure things and not knowing about them without any alerts, which ultimately results in unexpected expensive bills that can burn a small startup’s budget very fast.
