The tale of Zesty Disk: A new era of scalable EBS management

By Uri Naiman
Senior Sales Engineer

Part 1: The EBS management crisis

Once upon a time, way back in 2020, DevOps engineers were suffering from the dreaded AWS bill. This bill was feared near and far all across the land, because it would cost companies millions of dollars for storage that was not being used.

Engineers were ravaged by the dilemma of over-provisioning as they were required to predict their EBS storage volumes in advance.

With no crystal ball in hand, accurately forecasting disk utilization was nearly impossible. After all, application needs are always dynamic. They rise during peak hours and drop throughout the day (especially at night). Yet there was no way to shrink EBS volumes to accommodate these fluctuations.

Not allocating enough EBS volumes brought the risk of service degradation and failure, a fate that caused trepidation in the hearts of all engineers. So in response, they allocated two to five times more disk storage than necessary to accommodate scale. This resulted in significant cloud waste and a large AWS bill at the end of each month.

If this dilemma wasn’t challenging enough, engineers also spent hours manually adjusting storage capacity, which was an incredibly tedious and inefficient task. Soon, the plagues of boredom and frustration spread throughout the land as engineers spent too much of their time managing EBS instead of using their powers to develop new products and features.

Part 2: The Rise of Zesty Disk

As the plagues worsened, Zesty’s team of cloud optimization experts knew there had to be a better way to manage block volumes. What they needed was something similar to AWS’s EC2 Auto-scaling tool for object storage, but for EBS. They worked day and night to develop a solution that would free engineering teams from spending too much time managing EBS volumes and could bring an end to the cloud waste caused by over-provisioned resources.

The result was Zesty Disk, a new EBS auto-scaler that instantly shrinks and expands EBS volumes based on real-time capacity needs.

It works by collecting real-time utilization, IOPS, and read/write metrics, has these metrics analyzed by using machine learning which produces a prediction of usage trends. With this information, Zesty Disk automatically merges or detaches storage volumes to fit an application’s storage needs as it’s used.

Just like magic! But with a strong basis in computer science.

The result is the first hands-free solution for optimizing EBS storage volumes and simplifying EBS management. Its automated technology ensures that application performance is unaffected by merging and detaching disk volumes, so absolutely no downtime is required.

Part 3: Living happily ever after with Zesty Disk

Engineers from near and far heard about Zesty Disk and its magical ability to cure block storage management woes. For the first time, they were full of hope that their EBS storage could be continuously optimized so cloud waste would be a thing of the past. They would no longer live in fear of their AWS storage bill and their days would never be occupied managing EBS volumes again.

Once Zesty Disk spread through the land, DevOps engineers breathed a collective sigh of relief. They cut EBS costs by 70%, enabling finance and DevOps departments to live together in harmony.

EBS hardships were finally solved and engineers could all live happily ever after.

Are you ready for the next generation of EBS management?

We hope you enjoyed the story of Zesty Disk. While we may have taken minor artistic liberties for entertainment purposes, our value proposition is 100% factual. (Okay so Zesty Disk may not be actual magic, but it is automated by AI, so it’s pretty cool 😉 )

Zesty Disk instantly adjusts EBS volumes with zero engineering effort.

Thirteen years after AWS’s release of EC2 auto-scaling, we believe it’s time for engineers to experience the same auto-scaling capabilities for their EBS volumes so they can finally offload the task of manually maintaining EBS volumes, forecasting future storage requirements, and performing continuous capacity adjustments.

Are you ready to learn more?

Check out this detailed solution brief to find out more about Zesty Disk and see it live, in action!