What are the main challenges of managing cloud storage at scale?
Managing cloud storage at scale presents challenges such as selecting the right storage service for each workload, provisioning the correct amount of storage and IOPS, choosing the right metrics for optimization, and handling data lifecycle management. As data grows to terabytes or petabytes and the number of S3 buckets increases into the thousands, manual management becomes nearly impossible, making autonomous solutions essential for efficiency and cost control.
How does Sedai help optimize Amazon S3 storage costs?
Sedai autonomously manages S3 storage by observing access patterns, recommending and implementing optimal storage classes (such as Intelligent-Tiering), and automating data lifecycle management. This approach can deliver up to 30% cost savings by ensuring data is stored in the most cost-effective class based on real-time usage, even after accounting for additional monitoring costs.
What is Intelligent-Tiering in Amazon S3, and how does Sedai use it?
Intelligent-Tiering is an Amazon S3 feature that automatically moves data between storage classes based on access patterns. Sedai leverages Intelligent-Tiering by continuously monitoring bucket usage and shifting objects to lower-cost storage classes when access frequency drops, ensuring cost-effectiveness without manual intervention.
How does Sedai determine the optimal storage class for my S3 buckets?
Sedai observes access patterns using metrics from CloudWatch, storage lens, and server access logs. It categorizes buckets based on predictable or unpredictable access and assigns the most suitable storage class, such as S3 Standard for frequent access or Intelligent-Tiering for unpredictable patterns, maximizing cost savings and performance.
What cost savings can I expect from Sedai's autonomous S3 optimization?
Customers can expect up to 30% cost savings on S3 storage by using Sedai's autonomous optimization. This is achieved by dynamically configuring buckets to the most cost-effective storage classes and automating lifecycle transitions, as demonstrated in Sedai's application screenshots and customer results.
How does Sedai handle data lifecycle management in S3?
Sedai automates data lifecycle management by observing access patterns and applying lifecycle policies that transition data to appropriate storage classes or archive tiers. This ensures that data is stored efficiently, reducing costs and manual effort for administrators and SREs.
What are the benefits of using an autonomous system for cloud storage optimization?
An autonomous system like Sedai can handle large-scale storage environments, configure thousands of S3 buckets individually, and continuously adapt to changing access patterns. This eliminates manual toil, reduces errors, and ensures ongoing cost and performance optimization without human intervention.
How does Sedai's autonomous optimization compare to manual or traditional automated approaches?
Sedai's autonomous optimization continuously monitors and configures each bucket based on real-time data, whereas manual or traditional automated approaches require ongoing human oversight and cannot scale efficiently to thousands of buckets. Sedai's system adapts to changes and optimizes at a granular level, delivering greater cost savings and operational efficiency.
What are the key factors to consider when choosing an S3 storage class?
Key factors include data retrieval latency (how quickly you need access), availability requirements (multi-zone redundancy vs. single zone), durability (long-term storage needs), and access patterns (frequency and predictability). Sedai automates these decisions by analyzing your actual usage data and applying the optimal class for each bucket.
How does Sedai monitor and analyze S3 access patterns?
Sedai uses data from AWS CloudWatch, storage lens metrics, and server access logs to monitor how frequently and in what patterns each S3 bucket is accessed. This information is used to categorize buckets and automate storage class assignments for maximum efficiency.
What operational benefits does Sedai provide for SREs and administrators managing cloud storage?
Sedai reduces manual toil, eliminates the need for repetitive configuration tasks, and ensures that storage resources are always optimized for cost and performance. This allows SREs and administrators to focus on higher-value work and innovation rather than routine management.
Can Sedai optimize storage for other AWS services besides S3?
While this article focuses on S3, Sedai's autonomous optimization platform also supports other AWS storage services such as EBS and EFS, as well as compute and data resources across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes environments. For details, see Sedai's solution briefs.
How does Sedai ensure that storage optimization does not impact data availability or durability?
Sedai's autonomous system considers availability and durability requirements when assigning storage classes. For example, it uses S3 Standard for high-availability needs and Glacier Deep Archive for long-term, less-accessed data, ensuring that business requirements are always met.
What is the process for enabling Sedai's autonomous storage optimization?
Existing Sedai customers can configure autonomous storage optimization directly from their dashboard. New customers can sign up for Sedai and follow the onboarding process, which includes connecting cloud accounts and enabling autonomous optimization for storage resources.
How does Sedai handle unpredictable access patterns in S3 buckets?
Sedai recommends and configures Intelligent-Tiering for buckets with unpredictable access patterns. This ensures that data is automatically moved to the most cost-effective storage class as usage changes, without requiring manual intervention.
What are the main use cases for Amazon S3 that Sedai supports?
Sedai supports Amazon S3 use cases such as local data storage, IoT data management, big data processing and analytics, content distribution, data migrations, and application back-ends. Sedai's autonomous optimization ensures these use cases are cost-effective and high-performing at scale.
How does Sedai's autonomous system adapt to changing data access patterns?
Sedai continuously monitors access patterns and automatically adjusts storage class assignments as usage changes. This ensures ongoing optimization and cost savings, even as workloads and data access evolve over time.
What is the role of monitoring tools like CloudWatch in Sedai's optimization process?
Monitoring tools like AWS CloudWatch provide the metrics and access logs that Sedai uses to analyze bucket usage and access patterns. This data is essential for making informed, autonomous decisions about storage class assignments and lifecycle policies.
How does Sedai help with compliance and governance in cloud storage?
Sedai supports monitoring and governance by tracking usage, ensuring compliance with policies, and integrating with ITSM and Infrastructure as Code workflows. This provides safe, auditable, and compliant changes to cloud storage configurations.
How can I get started with Sedai's autonomous storage optimization?
You can sign up for Sedai and enable autonomous storage optimization through the dashboard. The setup process is quick, and you can schedule a demo or onboarding session for personalized assistance. A 30-day free trial is available for new users to experience the benefits firsthand.
Features & Capabilities
What features does Sedai offer for autonomous cloud optimization?
Sedai offers autonomous optimization for cost, performance, and availability; proactive issue resolution; full-stack coverage across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes; release intelligence; multiple modes of operation (Datapilot, Copilot, Autopilot); and enterprise-grade governance. These features help reduce costs, improve performance, and enhance reliability.
Does Sedai support integration with monitoring and DevOps tools?
Yes, Sedai integrates with monitoring tools like CloudWatch, Prometheus, Datadog, and Azure Monitor; Kubernetes autoscalers; Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform; CI/CD platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket; ITSM tools like ServiceNow and Jira; and notification tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
What are the modes of operation in Sedai?
Sedai offers three modes: Datapilot (observability), Copilot (one-click optimizations), and Autopilot (fully autonomous execution). This allows organizations to choose the level of automation that fits their operational needs.
How does Sedai ensure safe and auditable changes in cloud environments?
Sedai integrates with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), IT Service Management (ITSM), and compliance workflows to ensure all changes are safe, validated, and auditable. This supports enterprise-grade governance and risk management.
What productivity gains can Sedai deliver?
Sedai automates routine tasks such as capacity tweaks and scaling policies, delivering up to 6X productivity gains for engineering teams. This allows teams to focus on innovation and high-value work instead of manual optimizations.
Use Cases & Benefits
Who can benefit from Sedai's autonomous cloud optimization?
Sedai is designed for platform engineers, IT/cloud operations teams, technology leaders (CTO, CIO, VP Engineering), site reliability engineers (SREs), and FinOps professionals in organizations with significant cloud operations across industries such as cybersecurity, IT, financial services, healthcare, travel, and e-commerce.
What business impact can customers expect from using Sedai?
Customers can achieve up to 50% cloud cost savings, 75% latency reduction, 6X productivity gains, and 50% fewer failed customer interactions. Case studies include Palo Alto Networks saving $3.5 million and KnowBe4 achieving 50% cost savings in production.
What problems does Sedai solve for cloud teams?
Sedai addresses cost inefficiencies, operational toil, performance and latency issues, lack of proactive issue resolution, complexity in multi-cloud environments, and misaligned priorities between engineering and FinOps teams.
What are some real-world success stories with Sedai?
KnowBe4 achieved 50% cost savings and saved $1.2 million on AWS bills. Palo Alto Networks saved $3.5 million and reduced Kubernetes costs by 46%. Belcorp reduced AWS Lambda latency by 77%. See more at Sedai's resources page.
Which industries are represented in Sedai's case studies?
Sedai's case studies cover cybersecurity (Palo Alto Networks), IT (HP), financial services (Experian, CapitalOne Bank), security awareness training (KnowBe4), travel (Expedia), healthcare (GSK), car rental (Avis), retail/e-commerce (Belcorp), SaaS (Freshworks), and digital commerce (Campspot).
Technical Requirements & Implementation
How long does it take to implement Sedai?
Sedai's setup process takes just 5 minutes for general use cases and up to 15 minutes for scenarios like AWS Lambda. More complex environments may require additional time, and personalized onboarding is available.
Is Sedai easy to start and use?
Yes, Sedai offers plug-and-play implementation, agentless integration via IAM, and comprehensive onboarding support. Customers can access detailed documentation, a community Slack channel, and a 30-day free trial for a risk-free start.
Where can I find technical documentation for Sedai?
What security and compliance certifications does Sedai have?
Sedai is SOC 2 certified, demonstrating adherence to stringent security and compliance standards for data protection. More details are available on Sedai's Security page.
Competition & Differentiation
How does Sedai differ from other cloud optimization tools?
Sedai offers 100% autonomous optimization, proactive issue resolution, application-aware intelligence, full-stack cloud coverage, release intelligence, and rapid plug-and-play implementation. Unlike competitors that rely on static rules or manual adjustments, Sedai continuously adapts to real application behavior for ongoing cost and performance gains.
What unique features set Sedai apart from competitors?
Unique features include autonomous optimization (no manual intervention), proactive issue resolution, application-aware intelligence, release intelligence, and a quick setup process. Sedai also provides enterprise-grade governance and integrates with a wide range of DevOps and ITSM tools.
How does Sedai address the needs of different user segments?
For platform engineers, Sedai automates routine tasks and ensures IaC consistency. For IT/cloud ops, it reduces ticket volume and ensures safe automation. For technology leaders, it delivers measurable ROI and cost savings. For FinOps, it aligns engineering and cost efficiency goals. For SREs, it proactively resolves issues and reduces manual toil.
Customer Proof & Social Validation
Who are some of Sedai's notable customers?
Sedai's customers include Palo Alto Networks, HP, Experian, KnowBe4, Expedia, CapitalOne Bank, GSK, and Avis. These organizations trust Sedai to optimize their cloud environments and improve operational efficiency.
What feedback have customers given about Sedai's ease of use?
Customers praise Sedai for its quick setup (5–15 minutes), agentless integration, personalized onboarding, detailed documentation, and risk-free 30-day trial. These features make adoption smooth and accessible for teams of all sizes.
Storage is one of the most critical pillars in our application stack. Most of us are working with data, using data, and surrounded by data. We generate lots of data from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep. This data is very critical, and we have to make sure that it is stored very securely and efficiently and that they are available at any time whenever we need it.
Managing this data storage is critical, and it's one of the major headaches for every SRE in the world. In this article, we will discuss cloud storage solutions, challenges you may face when you are running cloud storage services at scale, and how Sedai can autonomously help you optimize them.
Understanding Cloud Storage Solutions
Cloud storage means storing, accessing, and maintaining storage in the cloud. You don’t need to worry about the physical infrastructure in the cloud. Before the cloud era began, people were setting up their own data centres and maintaining the servers for storing the data. But now, in the cloud era, you can move all your data into the cloud.
You don't need to worry about operational parts. A cloud service provider manages everything. You don't need to worry about the capital expenditure as well. Everything will be taken care of by the cloud service provider. You just need to provision the services, use them, and pay for them.
If you look at the cloud storage landscape, almost all cloud service providers provide a variety of services for you. Let’s take an example of AWS. Here are the main storage services offered by AWS:
Amazon S3 is the best object storage service. It is scalable for storing large amounts of data.
Amazon EBS is a leading block storage service in the cloud. It provides storage for Amazon EC2.
Amazon EF is a fully managed file storage service. It offers file storage for AWS cloud services.
Amazon FSx is also a file storage service for Windows and Lustre file systems. It provides fully managed file storage for Windows applications.
As an administrator or SRE, you may face challenges when working with cloud services. These include:
One of the challenges that you may face is selecting the right service for your workload.
If you're using block storage, provisioning the right amount of storage volume for your workload or setting up the right IOPS for your workload will also be challenging.
The most critical and most challenging task is choosing the right metric based on which you are taking action on your storage services.
If you're running a small workload or taking care of a single tenant, it might be very easy for you. However, dealing with data on a large scale will be very difficult.
Amazon S3 and Its Use Cases
Amazon S3 is one of the most popular object storage services in the cloud. It provides users with a variety of services. Here are some of these:
It acts as a solution for local data storage needs.
It manages large volumes of data generated by IoT devices.
It serves as a strong back-end for big data processing and analytics.
People use it for data storage, big data analytics, and content distribution.
It is also used for local storage, analytics, data migrations, and applications.
S3 is one of the first storage services AWS announced. It is very useful if you are running a small workload. Most users start with one or two S3 buckets and eventually reach tens or hundreds of S3 buckets.
Taking into account an enterprise customer, they have thousands of S3 buckets and store terabytes or even petabytes of data in the cloud. If you are managing data at a large scale like this, these are some operational challenges that you may face. The most common ones are cost management and data lifecycle management.
AWS provides a couple of recommendations that users can optimize. These include:
Use storage class wisely: Select the suitable storage class for cost and access needs.
Lifecycle policies: Automate data transitions to save costs.
Enable transfer acceleration: Speed up global file transfers.
Monitoring and governance: Track usage and ensure compliance.
Regularly review and optimize: Regularly optimize resources for efficiency.
When dealing with petabytes of data, an individual human or a group of people will not be able to handle it properly. Here, Sedai can help.
The Need for Autonomous Management
To deal with large amounts of data, Sedai, an autonomous platform can help you.
Data is growing faster than ever. Generative AI has already taken over the world, using a large amount of data to produce the results that the user wants.
Sedai has been working with many enterprise customers. Most of these customers are optimizing their modern application stacks.
Sedai is optimizing serverless and containerized applications. Customers re-visit them with the most satisfied responses.
Announcing Autonomous Storage Optimization
With the help of giant, noteworthy fintech partners with whom we have collaborated, we announce Sedai Autonomous Storage Optimization. If you are an existing customer of Sedai, you can configure Sedai Autonomous Optimization for storage in your dashboard.
If you are a customer looking for a solution for storage optimization, Sedai is the right choice for you. Sign up for Sedai now.
How Sedai Optimizes Storage Solutions for Amazon S3
Now that we have discussed various cloud storage options and the challenges that we are facing in detail, let’s see how Sedai is autonomously optimizing storage solutions for Amazon S3.
When a customer starts cloud storage, his initial requirements are fulfilled by a small number of data buckets. However, over the years of development, the requirements have grown considerably, resulting in tens of thousands of data buckets.
Imagine configuring all these buckets to their optimal configuration. It is almost impossible to configure these individually or manually. Not even an automated system can handle this scale to optimize all the buckets of data and configure all this properly.
This is where an autonomous system can benefit you. Instead of manually handling all these buckets, you can trust an autonomous system with this job. This system can configure all these buckets individually to fit their optimal configuration.
Understanding Cloud Storage Classes
Storage classes are purpose-built to provide the lowest-cost storage for different access patterns. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) was launched on March 14, 2006, and at that time, it was the only storage class available as standard storage. This storage class is irrespective of whether you use it for archiving or instant retrieval. The rate of storage remains constant.
Over the years, AWS has identified different ways S3 is being used and developed these different storage classes.
Choose the right storage class when you configure an S3 bucket. Take an example of access frequency. If a user accesses the bucket a few times a month, the access pattern is frequent. So, the best fit for that would be the S3 Standard storage class. It is very ideal for applications such as website hosting or content distribution.
While choosing the right storage class for Amazon S3, you need to consider some factors:
Data Retrieval Latency: How quickly do you need to access your data? If you need data almost instantly (in milliseconds), the S3 Standard storage class is ideal. If you can wait a few hours, you might consider options like S3 Glacier.
Availability: Do you need your data to be available in several locations for redundancy purposes, or is it right to store it in just one Availability Zone? Classes like S3 Standard will ensure your data is strewn about multiple zones to ensure availability, whereas S3 One Zone-IA stores data in a single zone.
Durability: How long do you need to keep your data? If you need longer-term storage, you might steer toward classes like S3 Glacier Deep Archive, which charges very low storage costs but retrieves with much higher costs and long wait times.
Intelligent-Tiering: This is an extra feature that automatically shifts your data to any storage class, depending on the access patterns. Amazon monitors the access to your data and shifts it to a lower-cost storage class but monitoring service at an extra cost.
Now that we know different storage classes, let's see how this information can be used and fed into an autonomous system so that it can manage the configuring of all your data buckets on a large scale.
Observing Access Patterns for Optimization
The first thing that the autonomous system would do is observe the access patterns of your bucket. This data can be sourced from CloudWatch metrics and storage lens metrics. This data can also be obtained from server access logs, which will give access information at an individual level.
This will help the user to identify what kind of access pattern does a certain bucket or a set of buckets has.
Here, we can categorize access patterns into two main types:
When access patterns are predictable, we can assign objects or buckets to the appropriate storage classes.
For buckets with unpredictable access patterns, it is advisable to use intelligent tiering.
Below are some benefits of Intelligent Tiering:
Automatically observes and tracks access patterns.
Moves objects between storage classes based on real-time usage.
Confirms cost-effectiveness without requiring manual intervention.
If additional monitoring costs are involved, they will be cheaper than keeping all your data in the standard storage class. The system has to monitor all the buckets continuously. It adapts to changing access patterns.
Cost Benefits of Autonomous Management
Below is an image from Sedai’s application that shows the cost benefits we can achieve by employing this autonomous management of S3 buckets.
The image shows that there is approximately 30% cost savings. This means that the Sedai application can bring in 30% cost savings by configuring the buckets autonomously.
On the right side of the image, you can see that the bucket has a standard storage class. What Sedai recommends will appear there, too. In this case, Sedai recommends moving this bucket into intelligent tiering.
If you look at the total number of objects and the number of frequently accessed objects, you will be able to observe that the percentage of objects that are frequently accessed is much less compared to the total number of objects.
Another advantage is that we can also see the cost when it is in the standard storage class. This helps in summarising the net savings that we are making.
After the complete process of additional monitoring costs, it is still cheaper than keeping all the objects in the standard storage class. Once you enable autonomous mode for this bucket, Sedai will take care of the transition so that you can see the cost benefits.
Optimize Your Cloud Storage Costs with Sedai Autonomous System
We've discussed the difficulties of overseeing cloud-based data systems. We observe and monitor your data access patterns to determine the appropriate storage class. Sedai helps manage the data lifecycle in cloud storage effectively while not wasting storage space at any particular point in time.
The autonomous optimization solution from Sedai can save expenses and improve the operation of your data buckets. We help reduce costs by giving recommendations on efficient storage solutions and configurations. To find out how Sedai might help you, sign up for a demo with Sedai.
