AWS EBS – Elastic Block Storage – customers usually massively over-provision cloud storage capacity and pay way more than they should. Capacity utilisation on EBS is between 10% and 30%, according to Datafy, a startup that claims it can slash AWS customers’ EBS bills by adding greater granularity to their cloud block storage deployments.
According to Gurdip Kalley, head of business development at Datafy, the core issue with AWS EBS is that it is effectively a form of direct-attached storage (DAS) but in the cloud, and that differs from other AWS block storage such as FSX which can be one-to-many. And so, because of this, customer devops engineers invariably over-provision capacity because it’s very difficult to predict usage, especially in Kubernetes deployments.
“EBS is elastic, but it’s not that elastic,” said Kalley. “So, customers pay up front for capacity, just like you do for mobile phone storage and you pay whether you use it or not.”
According to Kalley, EBS eclipses all other AWS cloud storage services in terms of revenue, with a Datafy-estimated $10bn of income. “It’s popular because it’s the easiest way to lift-and-shift storage for EC2 and EKS applications,” he said.
But there’s a problem in terms of scaling. To scale up is easy, said Kalley, but to scale down is far less so. What you have to do is to create a new, smaller volume, move the data, then break all connections with the application and the old volume and connect to the new volume, he said, adding: “Customers have said it’s basically a migration, and they’ll do this once or twice, but not after that.”
What Datafy does is deploy an agent in all instances of customer AWS compute. Here, it determines the size of volumes and replaces single larger volumes with a number of smaller ones.
This is where Datafy’s smarts reside – in its virtualisation of many volumes to make them appear as one, and so allow easier scaling as multiple volumes are added and subtracted to right-size capacity.
Kalley said there are no “non-AWS concepts” introduced to the running of Datafy agents and supra-agent intelligence. “Customer data is copied from the original volume to the Datafy volume [actually volumes, in the plural],” he said. “Now, the original can be deleted and the customer will now save money. We can grow capacity in real time as needed, with shrinking taking place to ensure the least possible disruption.”
Pricing is based on capacity managed and comes in at 20% of AWS capacity managed. If that seems a steep percentage, it’s because Datafy is confident the customer will pay a lot less than it did for over-provisioned AWS EBS storage.
For example, if you were spending $100 per month and now spend $40 per month – which assumes a previous utilisation rate of 40% – the cost of Datafy would be 20% of the latter figure and a total of $48. And you only pay if you make savings.
Datafy is available on the AWS marketplace, starting in Q1 2025.
Later in 2025, Datafy will expand its capabilities to Azure and Google Coud Platform block storage.
