After the pandemic-driven explosion of cloud adoption in the enterprise, the cost is finally coming under the microscope. USAMore than a third of businesses report having cloud budgets in excess of 40%, according to one poll of the observability software provider Pepperdata. A separate survey from Flexera found that optimizing the use of existing cloud services was the top initiative for 59% of companies – cost was the main driver.
An entire cottage industry of starting a business has popped up around cloud optimization. But one of the races, Computer Synchronization, which claims to uniquely bind business goals such as cost reduction and direct runtime to low-level infrastructure configurations. Founded as a spin-off from MIT’s Lincoln Labs, Sync today raised $12 million in a venture funding round (plus $3.5 million in debt) led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from The Engine, Moore Strategic Ventures and National Grid Partners.
Sync cofounders Jeff Chou and Suraj Bramhavar were both part of the engineering team at MIT Lincoln Labs before launching the startup. Bramhavar came to MIT with a photonics research position at Intel, while Chou co-founded another startup – Anoka Microsystems – that designed a low-cost optical switch.
Sync was born from innovations developed at Lincoln Laboratories, including method to accelerate a mathematical optimization problem commonly found in logistics applications. While many cloud costing solutions provide recommendations for high-level optimization or support workload tuning workflows, Sync goes deeper, Chou and Bramhavar saidwith application-specific details and recommendations based on algorithms designed to “sort” the appropriate resources.
“[We realized that our methods] can dramatically improve the resource utilization of all large-scale computing systems,” Chou told TechCrunch in an email interview. “As Moore’s Law slows down, this will become an important technological bottleneck.”
Chou claims that Sync doesn’t require much historical data to start optimizing the data pipeline and providing low-end cloud resources. For example, he says, with just data from a previous run, some customers have accelerated their Apache Spark workflow by up to 80% – Apache Spark is a popular analytics source engine for data processing .
Sync recently released an API and “autotuner” for Spark on AWS EMR, Amazon’s cloud big data platform, and Databricks on AWS. Self-service support for Databricks on Azure is underway.
“The launch of our public API will allow users to programmatically apply the Synchronization tool to a large number of jobs and enable continuous monitoring [cloud environments] with custom integrations,” said Chou. “C-suite is interested in managing cloud costs, and our automated tool Sync does this while accelerating the output of data science and data analytics teams… Product also enables data engineers to quickly change infrastructure settings to achieve business goals. For example, one day teams may need to minimize costs and reduce runtime prioritization, but the next day, they may have a tough deadline, hence the need to speed up the run. With Sync, this can be done with one click. “
Sync first applied its technology inside MIT’s Supercomputing Center before working with larger government high-performance computing centers, including the Department of Defense – for a $1 contract. millions of dollars. Now, Sync says it has about 300 registered users on its self-service app, and “several dozen” design partners testing and providing feedback, including Duolingo and engineers at the team. Disney’s streaming service.
“The pandemic and the recent economic environment have been a boon for Sync, as controlling cloud costs through improving efficiency is currently a top priority for many cloud software as a service companies. origin. Many companies are freezing hiring and need an ‘easy button’ to reduce cloud costs without adding an extra burden or cost to teams that are already overworked,” Chou said. In recent economic times, demand for Sync’s unique approach has increased dramatically, which has been adopted by large enterprise customers.Our main challenge is for developers and CTOs to see. what we’ve built is different and also realized that both can make substantial profits using it.”
Chou said the funding from the latest round, which brings Boston-based Sync’s total capital to $21.6 million, will be devoted to customer acquisition, marketing and sales, and product development. and R&D, including further integration of existing engineering processes. Sync currently has 14 employees, a number that Chou expects to grow to 25 by the end of the year.
