Dear Mr. Rajani, welcome to Entrepreneurship-interviews.com. Today’s interview it’s going to be a little more technical, but IT can be a nice place for entrepreneurs. You get to create value with nothing other than your brain, a computer, and access to the internet. Let’s start with the beginning; what is cloudlytics.com?
Mr. Rajani: Cloudlytics is a service that helps companies to monitor and manage the technology infrastructure resources that they use on the Amazon Web Services Cloud platform. Cloudlytics comes with three modules, log analytics, billing management, and infrastructure monitoring.
For the non-tech reader, what is AWS, and how is it different from regular hosting?
Mr. Rajani: AWS or Amazon Web Services is the leading Cloud Computing platform that allows users to use technology infrastructure in a “pay as you go” model, without having to invest in any capital infrastructure and without signing any agreements. Think of it as utility computing; use what you want and pay for what you use.
From my own experience, server logs are a great untapped resource that could really help to either optimize costs or help you understand what works when it comes to traffic on your sites. So how exactly does Cloudlytics help AWS users?
Mr. Rajani: Logs record all activities within your environment, including access details to application and infrastructure, infrastructure performance, changes in the database, application output, and much more. Cloudlytics allows users to process the logs and convert them into meaningful information that can be used to take business and technology decisions, including security. Cloudlytics also helps to monitor and manage the health of the AWS infrastructure by sending real-time alerts to the IT team. The billing management module of Cloudlytics helps users to control and optimize the usage of infrastructure, resulting in managing their budgets.
At what point using tracking as a management tool for logs become important? Are we talking about huge traffic?
Mr. Rajani: You should plan to use log management tools from the very beginning. Logs are important not only for huge traffic and to analyze but also can be a way to identify issues way before you hit the high traffic. Logs also provide insights into the usage patterns of your application and infrastructure and details about security. You can make use of logs in many ways rather than just managing or monitoring traffic.
What kind of reports and features does Cloudlytics have?
Mr. Rajani: Each module has specific reports. In the log analytics module, we have twelve standard reports and 40+ custom matrices to generate a custom report. These reports include IP report, Timeline report, Geographic report, user access report, event-based report, EC2 event. In the billing module, one has access to resource-wise expenditure reports and billing alarms. The monitoring module offers features like EC2 schedulers, URL pinger, back-ups, and clean-ups, with resource reports being delivered to the user’s inbox at a defined interval.
From your estimations, how much can a company save by using Cloudlytics? And is it just saving money?
Mr. Rajani: Cloudlytics is not just about saving money. The value that Cloudlytics brings is multi-fold, including tips for direct cost savings and monitoring and managing your AWS infrastructure for indirect cost savings by making sure your infrastructure is highly available and scalable always.
We have observed that the right use of Cloudlytics features can help save up to 40% of usage costs.
Is it difficult to install and use?
Mr. Rajani: Cloudlytics is a Saas product and very simple to use. It does not require any installation. All a user has to do is create an account with Cloudlytics and configure a service by granting permissions to Cloudlytics to read the log files from the AWS Management Console.
Who’s using it already? If Can you name a few of your customers?
Mr. Rajani: Most of our customers are from the media vertical, but we also work with Non- profits, healthcare, and education. From the time of its launch till today, Cloudlytics has over 1700+ customers. Living on the Edge and NichVid, to name a few.
How did you come up with the idea? How did it all start?
Mr. Rajani: Cloudlytics is a product by BlazeClan Technologies, an AWS Consulting Partner. While we were helping customers with consulting around AWS, there were some customers who wanted a tool or a service that would help them to analyze the log data on AWS. Once we saw this requirement from multiple customers, we started developing Cloudlytics. It all started with customers asking for such a service, even today. We take feedback from the customers when we add or improve on a particular set of features in Cloudlytics.
How does it work, developing applications for AWS? Do you have to be a registered partner?
Mr. Rajani: Currently, we do not have the APIs for Cloudlytics open for partners, but we will have definitely have it over a period of time. Currently, we are integrating various platforms into Cloudlytics to enable a holistic view for our customers across infrastructure, security, and application monitoring.
Do you remember your first customer? How does it feel to know that people are using your software and it helps them do a better job?
Mr. Rajani: Yes, our first customer signed up within the first week of our launch, and I can tell you, there is no better feeling than having someone uses your product which you have been involved in developing since the inception of the idea. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from our customers, and that really keeps us motivated to do more and deliver better.