New Delhi, Aug 25 (IANS): With the explosion in digital and Cloud adoption among Indian enterprises of all sizes, some niche startups have taken birth to help software systems scale reliably, allowing site engineers to pinpoint a root cause with ease.

Last9 is a leading software reliability platform that helps engineering and DevOps teams measure, track and improve software reliability. Founded in early 2020 by Nishant Modak and Piyush Verma, the startup builds Google Maps and Search equivalents for microservices.

Nishant and Piyush told IANS that with measurable outcomes, and a path to defined goals, any organisation can have better visibility into the health of customer experiences.

Here are excerpts from an interview:

Q: Last9 is building the Google Maps and Search equivalent for microservices. Tell us a little about your journey so far, positioning of your product and the growth outlook over the next 2-3 years?

A: Software engineering is the least measured engineering vertical. Even as an industry, outcomes and quality measurements of engineering are opaque at best.

In our past gigs, we've wanted to change that as Site Reliability Engineers. The lack of tools to measure the efficacy of engineering, and end customer experience, is what made SRE, and eventually Last9, a compelling proposition.

With measurable outcomes, and a path to defined goals, any organisation can have better visibility into the health of customer experiences. This simply yields irate customers, frustrated engineers, and the business suffers significant losses. Last9 is changing this.

We currently have two products in our arsenal. Levitate is a TimeSeries Database Built for Performance at Scale, to avoid the hours and dollars spent behind managing your own metrics database.

Compass is a product to visualise metrics data, detect system failures, and provide relevant alerts in a timely fashion.

Together, our products help any engineering leader proactively identify system degradations, reduce the time taken to find failures in a service, set policies and alerts to mitigate downtimes. This ultimately drives down (TCO) Total cost of ownership, and improves productivity so leaders can focus on feature delivery, and not the necessary distractions of scale.

Q: What is Last9's vision/mission statement? What sets you apart from your competition?

A: Our Mission is to make running systems at scale, fun, and embarrassingly easy. Our Vision is to reduce all system failures to the last 9.

Q: Which geographical markets do you cater to? Has there been any tapering off in demand given the deteriorating macro environment?

A: We mostly cater to North America as of now. Most companies struggle to stay on top of microservices and predictable customer experiences. This is largely because their approach to the problem is fundamentally wrong. They are all our target customers.

We've already proven our competency to manage massive scale with a OTT client who has witnessed the most concurrent users -- this gives us immense validation to manage clients who have tremendous scale.

The current market environment will not have an impact on our offerings because of how critical it is to engineering teams. Last9's offerings help customers, engineers, and ultimately the business. The criticality of this tooling insulates us from classic market fluctuations.

Q: Can you share a prominent customer success story with us, like Disney Hotstar?

A: One of our clients is the largest live-streaming platform in the world. They manage the largest concurrent users (think millions of users using the app, all at the same time).

We've been able to offer critical reliability at a scale that hasn't been witnessed by any other application in the world. Providing that visibility into systems, and being able to proactively alert failures has helped our client serve critical moments to its customers. At their scale, proactive monitoring is the only answer to assure positive customer experiences.

After all, imagine missing a goal from Ronaldo, or a sixer from Kohli -- these moments disappear in seconds, and if a system fails at this critical juncture, you'll have thousands of irate customers on social media. Last9 has helped them translate these moments into memories.

Q: What has cloud technology and AWS allowed you to do that you couldn't do before?

A: At our scale of monitoring and data we process, our own reliability has to be top notch. Among the many available cloud providers, we found AWS's flexibility to scale out to be easy and cost efficient. Lastly, customer support and the solutions architect team is among the finest we've worked with

Q: In terms of business outcomes, what benefits have you experienced because of running on AWS? Please provide metrics where applicable:

A: Because we're backed by AWS, our ceiling of availability can be as high as 99.999 per cent.

The three 9s are important for us to deliver to our own customers, and AWS helps us in this endeavour. We use AWS services such as EC2, EKS, RDS, CloudWatch. AWS also provides fairly competitive pricing, that helps us gradually scale our org as we win more clients.

In terms of Risk improvements, the very fact of adhering to AWS's Well-Architected framework ensured operational excellence and improvement in risk exposure internally.