CAST AI Cloud Optimization Platform Review and Pricing 2023
CAST AI recognized a significant challenge facing many businesses, especially start-ups. Running applications on a cloud service can be expensive. About 60% of enterprises struggle to cut their cloud bill as they lack insight into cloud usage. In fact, they overpay for underutilized or underused cloud resources unknowingly.
For these reasons, many IT leaders have prioritized reducing cloud management costs. Identifying this challenge, CAST AI offers companies an advanced way to cut their cloud bills through adequate cloud optimization. The platform helps you automate DevOps tasks, prevent downtime, and increase your profit margin.
CAST AI provides many other features. This article explores these features, alongside CAST AI’s pricing, integrations, and policies. At the end of this piece, you should have enough information to decide if CAST AI is the appropriate tool to help you cut your cloud budget.
CAST AI Overview
CAST AI is a Kubernetes AI-driven cloud optimization platform that aims to decentralize the cloud industry to free businesses from the limitations of cloud providers. The company was born in 2019 out of the founders’ frustration of being unable to fix the issues associated with cloud bills through their former startup, Zenedge.
As a result, they decided to create CAST AI as a platform that would enable enterprises to automatically optimize and reduce their cloud costs without any human intervention. Over the years, CAST AI has helped businesses take ownership of cloud computing, embrace autonomous cloud, and build future-ready products.
The company has secured investments from world-class investors like Cota Captial, Samsung Next, Florida Funders, and Creandum. Besides, clients like Container Journal, TechCrunch, Forbes, The Register, and Venture Beat have attested to using its products to optimize cloud-native apps across service providers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web services.
As a leading all-in-one platform for Kubernetes automation, CAST AI has helped several European businesses save about $1,125,440.25 on cloud service. The platform is certified according to SOC 2, ISO 27001, and CIS Benchmarks. The 2023 Gartner Cool Vendors Report also acknowledged the cloud management platform as a Cool Vendor.
That means CAST AI is innovative, impactful, and potentially disruptive in cloud computing. Businesses can instruct the platform to identify cost-saving and optimization opportunities with a few button clicks.
- Established: 2019
- Founder: Leon Kuperman, Vilius Zukauskas, Yuri Frayman, and Laurent Gil
- Offices: United States, Israel, and Lithuania
5 Core Features of CAST AI
Expert Opinion
Rating: 4.4/5
CAST AI is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform that uses machine learning to help businesses evaluate how much they spend on cloud services and enhance their power of DevOps.
Since CAST AI focuses on cloud providers to provide the best multi-cloud cost optimization features, it prioritizes autoscaling to deliver a resilient infrastructure for every Kubernetes workload. We found its bin pack nodes helpful for reducing the operational cost of our Kubernetes cluster. With it, we could deploy software apps, keep them running, and adjust their resources.
However, its user interface is quite confusing. It would help if the platform provided onboarding support, making it easy for customers to choose between connecting or creating cluster options. Unlike other cloud management platforms, CAST AI has automated security. This helps businesses get a detailed breakdown of their expenses and evaluate their security posture against best practices, industry standards, and CIS benchmarks.
Unfortunately, CAST AI only supports Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) despite many modern companies now run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The cloud platform pod migrations allow users to seamlessly move Kubernetes pods from node to node without restarting the system.
Another highlight of CAST AI is its ease of use. The platform provides multiple resources for users to implement cloud management solutions effectively. We liked that CAST AI reviews costs in real-time and offers optimization suggestions using autoscaling, spot instance automation, and bin packing functionalities. Overall, the platform is valuable in managing your Kubernetes operations on major cloud providers.
CAST AI Features
The following are CAST AI’s notable features:
1. IT Cost Monitoring
For proper cloud-based management, you need to monitor and track expenses. CAST AI’s cost monitoring allows businesses to assess their Kubernetes costs in real-time, monitor them in one place, and identify areas where they spend excess money. With this feature, you can evaluate the resources your cluster and workload use and view cost fluctuations over time.
It provides actionable insights into your most costly workload, cluster spend, cost per CPU, and predictions of your monthly cloud bill. This feature also comes in handy for breaking down your K8s expenses by namespaces, clusters, and workloads. By monitoring your costs in real-time, identifying an anomaly in your cloud before it becomes a problem is easy.
2. Kubernetes Container Security
Protecting your apps, data, and entire cloud infrastructure from several threats and vulnerabilities is vital in cloud computing. CAST AI’s Kubernetes container security ensures that cloud-based applications are trustworthy, resilient, and compliant. This feature includes config issue prioritization and vulnerability detection. For example, you can assess your cluster for problems and get recommendations for fixing them.
To run seamless security checks, CAST AI creates a prioritized list of issues to resolve and simplifies your analysis effort. Through this, your business’s IT team can become more efficient as they know the available fixes to make in the cloud system.
Kubernetes security feature provides a user-friendly dashboard, giving you security performance insights. Most importantly, this feature covers policy enforcement to ensure that a company’s engineering team follows consistent rules and avoids DevOps configuration mishaps.
3. Multi-Cloud Management
This cloud platform has multi-cloud management to avoid vendor lock-in and enhance disaster recovery. CAST AI offers a unified way for companies to manage different cloud environments. Using this feature, they can monitor and optimize several cloud resources efficiently.
Besides, CAST AI’s multi-cloud management functionality is essential for setting budget limits and leveraging cost-effective services across multiple cloud providers. With it, businesses will find deploying and scaling apps across various clouds to increase performance simple.
4. Automated Cloud Cost Optimization
Businesses can utilize their cloud spend entirely with CAST AI’s cost optimization. Through this feature, they can set up their cloud in minutes without the hassle of hiring engineers, letting them reduce costs. Rather than overpaying for cloud service products, the platform enables you to pay only for the resources your workload requires.
It does this by identifying your workload and selecting the best combination of resources. This feature has a dashboard that displays cost savings reports. As a result, your company can visualize how much it saves on cloud management.
5. AI Engine Autoscaling
CAST AI offers the best Kubernetes auto scalers that automatically adjust the number of cloud instances based on demand to scale your Kubernetes clusters with cost efficiency. A cloud instance is a virtual computer you can rent from a cloud service provider.
See it as having a computer in your cloud to manage software and store data without needing a physical computer. This feature lets you select instance types to find the cheapest one that meets your cloud needs. When more people use your business’s app, CAST AI’s auto scaler adds more resources to handle the traffic and vice versa.
That helps your software run smoothly during busy times and saves money during downtime, ensuring you don’t overpay for unused cloud resources. It’s like rightsizing the number of servers in a restaurant.
CAST AI Cloud Management Integrations
CAST AI users can connect their cloud infrastructure across Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS. Here’s how the platform works seamlessly with these integrations:
- AWS: CAST AI integrates with Amazon Web Services to ensure a cohesive security framework across a business’s cloud platform and AWS services. It also provides flexibility, as users can quickly transfer data between their cloud and AWS storage services like Amazon S3.
- Azure: Microsoft Azure is vital for developing, managing, and testing apps. Once you connect this service with CAST AI, simplifying the use of Azure resources is possible.
- Google Cloud: Since CAST AI’s integration includes tools for monitoring and analyzing cloud resources, companies can run it on Google Cloud to gain insight into their app’s performance. With it, developers can build apps that seamlessly use Google Cloud resources.
CAST AI Pricing and Plans
CAST AI offers users four flexible pricing packages. Each plan is tailored to suit every company’s budget, including startups, medium-sized businesses, and large firms. Here are CAST AI’s pricing and plans:
1. Free
As the name implies, this plan is entirely free. It’s an excellent package for testing CAST AI’s products to determine if they suit your business’s needs. You don’t need a credit card to use its free tools. All you need to do is sign up, connect your cluster, and enjoy CAST AI.
Features:
- Unlimited savings reports
- Cost reporting per workload
- Available savings report
- Self-onboarding support
- Data retention
Pricing:
The plan is free.
2. Growth
Companies looking to control their cloud without breaking the bank will find this plan vital. Unlike the free plan, you can automate about 500 CPUs and optimize up to four clusters. Aside from the regular Growth plan pricing, CAST AI charges users $5 per CPU.
Features:
- Instant rebalancing
- Intelligent up & downscaling
- Spot instant automation with fallback
- Cluster scheduling
- Cost visibility at every level
Pricing:
The plan is $200 per month.
3. Growth Pro
For a higher cloud optimization level, Growth Pro is an excellent pick. Similar to the growth plan, it requires users to pay $5 per CPU. Once you subscribe to this plan, you get every feature in Growth plus the ability to optimize unlimited clusters.
Features:
- Spot instance automation with fallback
- Real-time autoscaling
- Security report
- Cost report per namespaces
- EKS and AKS clusters
Pricing:
The plan is $1,000 per month.
4. Enterprise
This plan suits large enterprises and firms wanting unlimited security optimizations. It provides your business with first-class onboarding and 24/7 multi-team support. With it, you can automate unlimited CPUs.
Features:
- EKS, kOps, & AKS clusters
- Enterprise SSO
- Slack connect chat
- Organizational level security
- Cost visualization
Pricing:
The plan is $ 5,000 per month.
CAST AI Plan & Features Comparison Table
| Features | Free | Growth | Growth Pro | Enterprise |
| Price | Free | $200 | $1,000 | $5000 |
| Actionable Cost Recommendations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited Savings Reports | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Instant Rebalancing | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cluster Scheduling | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Weekday Support | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Dedicated Onboarding Session | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Enterprise SSO | No | No | No | Yes |
Terms and Policies
By accessing CAST AI’s dashboard or clicking “AGREE” during its customer onboarding process, you’re bound by the platform’s terms of service. While using its service, the company requires that customers provide their name, email address, professional information such as employer and position/title, usage data, and payment and billing details.
With this data, CAST AI manages your account, provides you with the latest updates, and monitors your usage of its services. The company reserves the right to terminate a customer’s use of its cloud services at any time and for any (or no reason). Since CAST AI prioritizes users’ privacy, it only discloses users’ data to third parties in good faith.
Customer Support
Like many other SaaS products, CAST AI’s customer support varies according to its plans. Although the platform offers community support across all plans, options like live chat and weekday support are only available to particular subscribers. For example, Enterprise subscribers can access CAST AI’s 24/7 multi-team support, Slack connect chat, and live chat option.
Consider filling out the “Contact Us” form on the website to book a meeting with their customer representative. CAST AI has a blog page featuring tips, tutorials, and guides on security management and Kubernetes costs. You can also find several customer stories on its website.
This way, you see how CAST AI’s product enables businesses to cut their cloud costs in half. The platform has a comparison section, showing its unique benefits and features compared to competitors. Through this, you can objectively evaluate CAST AI’s products.
You can also reach CAST AI through its social media handles or visit the headquarters.
Global Offices
CAST AI Group Inc.
111 NE 1st Street, 8th Floor #1041
Miami, FL 33132
CAST AI Baltic UAB
Lvivo g. 37, 3rd Floor, LT-09306 Vilnius
Lithuania
CAST AI Israel
Modern Midtown tower
Menachem Begin 144, Tel Aviv
Israel
Conclusion
CAST AI is undoubtedly an excellent opportunity for businesses to save money on cloud computing. With the high expense of hiring engineers, the platform helps save money by identifying mismanaged resources, removing cloud waste, and improving overall efficiency.
Rather than struggle with low ROI, your business can get the most out of your cloud environment while keeping costs down using CAST AI. With more integrations, any enterprise can use the tool to nail cloud cost visibility and control.
You can book a demo to determine whether CAST AI offers the support and functionality necessary for effective cloud optimization.
Contributors: Yinka ODUFOTE (Technical Writer); Olumide OKESIPE (Graphic Designer)
