Hot off a September 14, 2022 launch, Bluesky is helping Snowflake customers save time and money with an innovative approach to workload optimization.

The company: Bluesky

Bluesky provides data-driven enterprises with a workload optimization and data governance solution to better assess and get visibility into the cost implications of workload changes, then recommends ways to optimize performance more cost-effectively. The company is currently deploying their flagship product on Snowflake workloads. With Bluesky Data engineers spend less time manually monitoring and evaluating workloads and can focus on creating data-driven business value, faster. FinOps teams get peace of mind from knowing that data teams are following cloud financial best practices and optimizing workload performance to maximize their data cloud investment.

Bluesky’s origin

Founders Mingsheng Hong and Zheng Shao have been friends for 18 years. At a wedding in early 2022 (the groom became an angel investor) they discovered they were ready to step out of their comfortable “corporate” jobs and do something entrepreneurial with their mutual interest in big data, SQL query optimization, machine learning and the need to help companies get a handle on usage-based pricing in modern data cloud environments (yes, it’s nerdy). The two identified an emerging market for a data cloud workload-based optimization solution that would be applicable to any organization needing to maximize their investment in platforms such as Snowflake and other modern data clouds. Given their experience solving similar optimization challenges at web-scale companies like Facebook, Google and Uber they knew they could build something valuable for the enterprise market. They quickly got to work raising a seed round and building a world class engineering team. A mere 6 months later, they are ready to come out of stealth mode and bring Bluesky to life.

Why you should pay attention

Across industries, organizations are adopting modern data clouds to innovate and accelerate digital transformation. In today’s economic environment, every organization is looking for ways to keep data cloud costs under control while freeing up valuable data engineering resources to drive business value. The same traits that make cloud data easy to use and drive innovation also make it hard to manage from a financial perspective. Bluesky seeks to address this challenge by giving enterprises ongoing visibility into the cost implications of workload changes and automatically recommending ways to optimize performance more cost-effectively. In turn, Snowflake customers can concentrate on understanding and deriving value from their data rather than spending time refining, managing and optimizing the environment.

Their innovation to workload optimization stems from a unique algorithmic approach. In contrast to established cost visibility and optimization products like CloudHealth by VMWare for public clouds, Bluesky focuses on SQL query workloads and performs “whitebox analysis” to provide in-depth optimization suggestions. For example, when Bluesky finds queries that repeatedly read the last 2 years data on an hourly basis, it flags them and then provides automated rewrite suggestions. In contrast, the EC2 type of jobs being monitored by other cost visibility and optimization tools are “black boxes” where the internal logic is not known to the tools. As such, the optimization suggestions that can be made tend to be more limited.

Bluesky has already helped over a dozen companies reduce their Snowflake spend by 20% as well as increase query efficiency by up to 500x – massive financial and operational improvements. Bluesky complements Snowflake’s built-in capabilities such as their query optimizer with a unique workload optimization approach that goes beyond a single SQL query to cover a set of queries across data ingestion, transformation and analytics. By intelligently watching for similar query patterns, Bluesky can detect complex situations that simplistic visibility tools miss. Bluesky can suggest high-impact tuning options for valuable workloads, increasing efficiency while also looking out for clear savings hiding inside the noise of regular operations, such as long-running queries that fail repeatedly without providing any value.

How Bluesky works

Bluesky’s SaaS solution is designed from the ground up to make querying and analytics faster and cheaper over modern data clouds, in turn, delivering exceptional operational and financial value. Bluesky provides ongoing visibility into workloads to better understand data warehouse usage, daily credit utilization, queued jobs and more. Bluesky uses profile-driven Query Cost Attribution and pattern-based Query Clustering to understand the implications of how customers are using data and identify ways to optimize performance more cost-effectively. In turn, customers can immediately take action on any Bluesky-generated recommendation to drive measurable business impact.

Bluesky analyzes query patterns to detect similar groupings, using an innovative technology it calls query patterns. By intelligently watching for similar query patterns, Bluesky can detect complex situations that simplistic visibility tools miss. Bluesky can suggest high-impact tuning options for valuable workloads, increasing efficiency while also looking out for clear savings hiding inside the noise of regular operations, such as long-running queries that fail repeatedly without providing any value.

Benefits

Bluesky’s dynamic optimization engine delivers intelligent insights that help you optimize workload performance, improve governance and run data cloud infrastructure on a more cost-effective basis. Bluesky goes beyond simple infrastructure cost measurement and looks at patterns in how customers use data across their entire data cloud to continuously find opportunities for improvement.

Bluesky’s intelligent monitoring and actionable insights help Snowflake customers continuously optimize critical data workloads that support their business and enable agile, high-speed analytics at any scale. Instead of having unproductive, rearview-mirror conversations that end in countless delays, Bluesky delivers an intelligent workload optimization solution that lets data engineers take active ownership of their data cloud costs and performance and collaborate more effectively with finance teams and budget owners.

Next

If you are a data-driven enterprise concerned about the increasing costs and complexity associated with modern data clouds, Bluesky can help. For Snowflake users with an annual spend of $50,000+, they offer a Free “cost efficiency check” and best practices. Join Coinbase and other companies who are leveraging Bluesky to achieve up to 20% cost savings on their Snowflake workloads as well as 500x better query performance.

Join the team! If you want to be part of it all, they’re hiring. Reach out to learn about open positions.