Azul & ActiveViam launch solution to halve cloud analytics costs

Azul and ActiveViam have partnered to offer a new solution targeting cost reduction and performance improvement for financial analytics in the cloud.

Joint solution

The two companies have developed a combined offering using Azul's Platform Prime-its high-performance Java platform-with ActiveViam's Atoti analytics platform. This integration aims to help financial services organisations manage large-scale in-memory analytics more effectively, with the companies claiming the ability to reduce cloud infrastructure costs by up to 50%.

According to the companies, financial institutions are under growing pressure to deliver real-time risk analytics while controlling cloud infrastructure costs and meeting regulatory requirements for uptime, resiliency, and compliance. The adoption of the cloud for data-intensive applications has increased, but with it has come a rise in associated costs, sharpening the focus on optimisation at an executive level.

Technical capabilities

The solution leverages Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC) functionality within Azul Platform Prime, which allows users to create checkpoints, or snapshots, of fully warmed-up Java Virtual Machine (JVM) instances and application states. These snapshots can then be used to launch new JVMs near-instantly from the saved state, reducing the startup and warm-up times typically required by Java-based analytic workloads.

ActiveViam's Atoti platform, when combined with Azul Platform Prime's CRaC support, allows terabytes of in-memory analytic data to be elastically scaled up or down in minutes. This elasticity is designed to help institutions rapidly adjust their infrastructure according to demand, which can lead to cost savings and improved service reliability.

Customer application

The companies referred to a large global financial services group that had faced challenges with start-up times for a substantial in-memory credit risk application deployed on AWS Graviton. By integrating Atoti and Platform Prime with CRaC, the institution was reportedly able to provision in-memory Atoti instances within minutes instead of hours, thereby enhancing application elasticity, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Executive comments

"Through continuous innovation and close collaboration with Azul and our launch customers, Atoti has become the most cost-effective platform for complex financial analytics," said Antoine Chambille, Chief Technology Officer at ActiveViam. "By leveraging the power of Atoti and Azul Platform Prime, the two companies working together have unlocked a new way to reduce total cost of ownership while maintaining high performance and improving availability."

Gil Tene, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Azul, said, "The combination of ActiveViam's Atoti in-memory analytics and Azul Platform Prime has already proven its ability to deliver lightning-fast insights on terabytes of data without pauses or errors. By leveraging CRaC support in Azul Platform Prime, organizations can spin up new Atoti cubes in a fraction of the time previously required. This breakthrough not only accelerates time-to-insight but also drastically reduces infrastructure costs, making high-performance in-memory analytics more efficient and accessible than ever before."

Industry context

The partnership highlights ongoing efforts in the financial services sector to address infrastructure cost challenges associated with big data and analytics in the cloud. As institutions handle increasing volumes of data and focus on real-time analytics, there is a need for solutions that maintain or improve performance while managing operating costs. Regulatory scrutiny of uptime and resiliency is also prompting technology investments aimed at minimising risk and ensuring compliance.