Terraform Gets AI Boost in New Cloud Management Platform

Aharon Twizer has spent much of the past 10 years trying to make life in the cloud easier for enterprises, first as co-founder and CTO of Spot.io — a cloud compute management and cost optimization vendor bought by NetApp for $450 million in 2020 — and later as a principal partner solutions architect at public cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Since 2022, CEO Twizer and CTO Ori Yemini, another veteran of Spot.io, have been bringing to life ControlMonkey, a two-year-old startup they co-founded that offers a Terraform-based, AI-powered end-to-end cloud automation platform aimed at helping organizations manage and govern their fast-growing large-scale cloud infrastructure.

ControlMonkey, which has about 20 employees, already has a growing customer lineup of such high-profile names as Comcast, Intel, NetApp, and point-of-sale system maker Square and a tight partnership with AWS and relationships with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. That said, the Tel Aviv-based business this week is announcing its global launch and $7 million in seed round investments led by lool ventures and Joule Ventures.

With the money in the company’s coffers, Twizer told The New Stack that he and the rest of the ControlMonkey team will use it to expand the platform’s capabilities and expand its presence in the United States, including hiring more people in such areas as engineering and go-to-market (GTM).

“The past two years have been very good, business-wise,” he said. “I can’t really share the numbers, but I can say that the team is very happy with the numbers and so am I. We plan to grow, especially around enterprise customers, which is where we focus, for the reason that while there are a lot of point solutions out there that solve only specific parts of the automation problem, ControlMonkey is the only one that actually solves all of it.”

Automation Is the Thing

With ControlMonkey, Twizer and Yemini want to drive greater automation into all aspects of cloud management and governance, from code generation to error remediation to infrastructure disaster recovery. Enterprises already are seeing their cloud environments rapidly expanding and getting more complex, and it’s not going to get any easier going forward.

“There’s a lack of automation and visibility,” Twizer said. “Think about the typical CIO. They manage right now dozens of cloud-related tools. It cloud be the cloud vendors, their logging systems, or their monitoring systems. When you think about the next decade, those CIOs are going to probably manage more than that. The numbers are going to increase and there’s no automation around it. There is no end-to-end automation to actually automate that kind of infrastructure at scale.”

An Evolving Cloud Environment

Cloud adoption continues to surge. Flexera, in its annual State of the Cloud report, found that 89% of enterprises in 2024 said they were adopting multicloud strategies — up from 87% the year before — and market research firm Statista said that last year, 46% of workloads and 48% of data were in the public cloud, with that expected to jump in the next 12 months. Gartner expects that 70% of workloads will be running in the cloud by 2028.

That said, the initial rush to the cloud over the past decade has come with challenges, from cost and complexity to security issues and worries about vendor lock-in, convincing some organizations to start shifting some of those workloads back to on-premises infrastructure — a process called “cloud repatriation.” According to a survey by Citrix last year, about 42% of U.S. organizations have moved or are considering moving at least half of their cloud-based workloads out of the cloud.

Costs are an ongoing cloud concern for enterprises, Twizer said, noting that companies spend $140 billion every year because the tools they use aren’t good enough to manage cloud environments effectively or efficiently. ControlMonkey aims to change that.

All Things Terraform

The company’s platform is built atop the Terraform infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform and includes the Terraform Import Engine that enables cloud engineers to shift resources to Terraform rather than reprovisioning them, cutting migration time by 75% automatically generating the code. There’s also a Terraform GitOps continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) for infrastructure delivery at scale via a quality gate that ControlMonkey claims will prevent 90% of production issues.

Other capabilities include a unified dashboard for visualizing and controlling all cloud assets, AI tools that automatically detect and protect against drifts away from the desired cloud state, automated disaster recovery, best practices and standardization via set policies to address areas like cost and compliance and a self-service catalog of predefined Terraform infrastructure blueprints.

ControlMonkey claims the platform is driving a 30% increase in DevOps productivity and a 90% drop in production tickets.

The decision to embrace Terraform for IaC was easy, Twizer said, noting that there are more than 3,000 Terraform providers in the industry. That said, the company is flexible, the CEO said, adding that while “TerraForm currently is the leading framework, but we are not opinionated about it. Once the industry evolves, ControlMonkey will evolve with it.”

‘An Infrastructure Revolution’

With the rise of the cloud, there is a shift in how infrastructure is delivered, similar to the change in software delivery to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and to using developer tools like GitHub and JFrog, Twizer said.

“We try to do the same for infrastructure and the only way to do it at scale is by providing an end-to-end platform that provides best-in-class automation and AI tools,” he said. “We’re in the midst of the infrastructure revolution, and the first building block was infrastructure-as-code, and the second building block was a lot of point solutions or point tools. Now it’s the time for a fully end-to-end, holistic platform that can actually fulfill the promise of infrastructure-as-code and allow the cloud teams to deliver faster, focus more on innovation, reduce waste, and basically be in total control.”

Fast Expansion, More Self-Service

With the company rounding into the new year, a key goal for 2025 will be to “expand massively” the company’s abilities to support more use cases and to grow the self-service capabilities to allow non-cloud engineering teams to provision infrastructure on their own. Developers who aren’t cloud engineers will have the right tools and a service catalog with blueprints to choose from, they can spin up stacks of resources and apply specific sets of values, the blueprint is translated into code that the cloud team can review and approve.

Speed is the thing, Twizer said. Using the self-service tools, QA teams can resolve more bugs, R&D teams can generate more features, and sales team can do more demos. It removes the traffic jam caused when everything has to move through a single cloud team.

“Organizations are going to be expected to deliver faster,” he said. “When I say ‘organizations,’ it’s not only the cloud, it’s all of the business units. Right now, we see a common challenge in organizations that are big, with a lot of teams in them. The challenge is that there is a bottleneck within those cloud teams, and we try to reduce the friction and enable agility, but without sacrificing control.”