Reduce Your Cloud Costs With CAST AI On Azure Kubernetes Service Marketplace

We are pleased to announce that Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) users can now access CAST AI directly from AKS Marketplace. The new marketplace dedicated to K8s applications started recently, and we are one of its official launch partners. This step marks the start of CAST AI’s journey to bring automated cloud cost optimization and cost monitoring capabilities to Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure.

The Microsoft and CAST AI teams have been working tirelessly to ensure that CAST AI has been thoroughly tested and hardened on Azure Kubernetes Service. The solution has already been used by companies running on AKS, scaling and automating the Kubernetes deployment for cost reduction. Now, it’s directly accessible for easier installation within the AKS ecosystem.

”Our recent purchase of Cast AI has helped us optimize costs and automate AKS management, including cost reporting. Now having this available on the marketplace makes it even easier to integrate into our platform,” said James O’Hare, Principal Platform Engineer at NielsenIQ.

A dive into CAST AI cost saving features

CAST AI is an automated Kubernetes optimization platform that uses AI to drive decisions in a continuous, fully-automated cycle of scanning, analysis, and optimization.

Customers benefit from the platform’s unique mix of features as soon as they connect their clusters:

1. CAST AI analyzes all workloads and delivers a report with optimization recommendations.
2. Customers can turn automated optimization on, allowing CAST AI to optimize their clusters automatically, with no impact on availability and performance.
3. The platform will then keep on monitoring, analyzing, and automatically optimizing the cluster 24/7 to ensure continuous operations and cost predictability.

Here’s an overview of the differentiating CAST AI features:

Cost monitoring

When connecting an AKS cluster to the platform, users can instantly access a free cost monitoring suite with cost reduction recommendations.

The module offers a unique mix of features:

• Real-cost cost monitoring – available per cluster, workload, namespace, and allocation group,
• Historical cost data – hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly overview of cloud expenses that allows comparison and better planning,
• Workload efficiency – insights into cloud resource utilization in CPU, memory, and dollar terms,
• Custom optimization recommendations – these help customers save 60% on average and can be implemented instantly using CAST AI automation.

The platform combines a rich array of cost monitoring features with automated cost optimization, making it a unique offering on the market.

“Any modern company which is running on Kubernetes should try CAST AI, no matter the scale of their infrastructure. The platform combines many functionalities for which one would need separate products,” said Jenson C S, Engineering Manager at ShareChat, India’s largest homegrown social media company.

Automated cost optimization

Teams that take cost reduction seriously can go beyond cost monitoring. CAST AI will automatically manage and provision cloud resources to achieve an optimal balance between cost and performance.

The broad range of optimization features combined with AI-powered automation and dedicated support brings CAST AI to the top of cloud cost optimization platforms:

• Automated virtual machine selection and rightsizing – the platform picks the best matching types from hundreds of VM types and sizes, removing the time-consuming process of selection and provisioning.
• Autoscaling – CAST AI continuously analyzes the application demands and scales cloud resources up or down for optimal performance and minimum cost, scaling down to zero and removing VMs when no work needs to be done.
• Spot VM automation – thanks to automation, AKS users can leverage Spot virtual machines to cut their costs further without worrying about interruptions or lack of availability.

CAST AI delivers results to AKS customers at every stage of their adoption journey.

“The results we got from implementing CAST AI were brilliant right from the start. It’s all about the fact that we don’t need to worry about scaling our clusters anymore. Peace of mind is definitely one of the biggest benefits of the platform. Especially if you go multi cloud as the differences between managing EKS and AKS clusters are significant. CAST AI takes that complexity away,” said Alex Le Peltier, Head of Technology Operations at a UK-based fintech company Delio which uses a mix of cloud providers.