Business Outcomes:
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with additional offices in Seattle, WA and Bengaluru, India, SmartHub.ai is an award-winning software company at the forefront of AI-powered edge endpoint management, security & Intelligence. SmartHub.ai pioneers AI-driven edge endpoint management, unifying cybersecurity, risk management, and compliance into a single intelligent platform. Their solutions—SmartHub INFER™ and SmartHub NeuralEdge™—enable enterprises to secure, monitor, and automate thousands of IoT and OT devices at scale. With built-in AI/ML, SmartHub proactively detects anomalies, predicts failures, and enforces policies in real time—delivering up to 75% cost savings while improving uptime, security, and regulatory readiness across edge environments.
What sets SmartHub apart is their vendor-agnostic, protocol-aware platform that simplifies fragmented edge endpoints into a unified control plane. Trusted by Fortune 500 companies SmartHub.ai empowers organizations to shift from reactive maintenance to predictive intelligence. With real-time visibility, autonomous healing, and intelligent automation, SmartHub’s platform ensures compliance, hardens security, and future-proofs operational resilience.
For a dynamic startup like SmartHub.ai, with a lean team of edge experts, managing cloud costs while fostering rapid development is paramount. Their initial foray into public cloud solutions, including one of the big 3 Hyperscale cloud providers, presented significant financial hurdles. They were earlier using Rancher Kubernetes with their public cloud infrastructure, and were faced escalating cloud costs. This event catalyzed a shift in thinking around cloud cost optimization and infrastructure strategy for a more cost-effective and manageable Kubernetes solution.
"We're a small startup, so managing cloud costs is critical," explained Arun Narayanaswamy, Founder and CTO of SmartHub.ai. "We needed a Kubernetes solution that was not only significantly more cost-effective but also straightforward for our developers to use for our CI/CD processes. The existing options were proving too expensive and complex for our stage."
Rackspace Spot provided the solution SmartHub.ai was looking for. "There’s nothing in the cloud infrastructure space that can compete on pricing or usability with Spot," stated Arun Narayanaswamy, Founder and CTO of SmartHub.ai. By seamlessly automating the use of spot instances, including capacity and price visibility, Spot is taking a refreshing new approach to cloud cost optimization. The platform's clean, minimalist interface and straightforward Terraform integration allowed our team to spin up environments quickly, without the overwhelming complexity of "a million knobs" often found in other solutions.
While the solution initially met with some resistance among developers who were accustomed to direct access to their existing cloud provider, the clear cloud cost benefits and operational efficiencies of Rackspace Spot soon became apparent. SmartHub’s leadership, aware of the significant cost savings, championed its adoption. Over 5-6 months of usage, SmartHub.ai has witnessed the platform's evolution, noting significant improvements in stability and deployment speed. The team also leveraged Cloudflare Tunnel to further optimize bandwidth and load balancing costs.
"When we found Rackspace Spot, it almost seemed too good to be true," said Arun Narayanaswamy. "There’s nothing in the cloud infrastructure space that can compete on pricing or usability for our needs. The ability to quickly provision and manage our Kubernetes clusters via Terraform, without a million knobs to turn, was a game-changer."
The adoption of Rackspace Spot delivered compelling results for SmartHub.ai:
The SmartHub.ai team has observed the platform's continuous evolution, noting positively the enhancements in SSD performance and overall stability. While server pre-emption hasn't yet been a significant issue for their current workloads, they are keeping a close watch on their cluster availability metrics, in addition to realizing cost savings.
SmartHub.ai is enthusiastic about the continued evolution of Rackspace Spot. While their current usage is focused on CI/CD, they are considering its potential for production workloads. To make that leap, they are keen to see further hardening of the storage layer, including features like automatic backup and disaster recovery, to build even greater confidence. They also expressed interest in more detailed insights into bandwidth, production control plane performance, and historical pricing data to make more informed bidding decisions in the spot market.
The journey of SmartHub.ai with Rackspace Spot shows a real business outcome of achieving significant cloud cost savings without compromising on performance or usability. Rackspace Spot is proud to support innovators like SmartHub.ai as they build the future of edge endpoint management and intelligence.