The End of Manual Optimization: Why We Acquired StormForge 

Today is a big day for CloudBolt—we’ve officially announced our acquisition of StormForge. 

This marks a major milestone for us and for the broader FinOps community because it tackles head on a painful and persistent truth: you can’t manually optimize your way to cost and performance efficiency. 

The rising adoption—and rising cost—of Kubernetes has only intensified the issue. The manual optimization paradigm is dead. Episodic, high-human-effort approaches can’t keep up with the speed, complexity, and scale of modern infrastructure. 

By combining StormForge’s patent-pending machine learning capabilities and Kubernetes optimization platform with CloudBolt’s third-generation Augmented FinOps platform, we’re taking a huge step toward ending that legacy approach for good. 

Two complementary technologies 

StormForge and CloudBolt have always been two pieces of a puzzle that fit perfectly together.  

We first partnered together in early 2024, when StormForge became the inaugural member of our Technical Alliance Program (TAP). Our shared goal was to bring cost visibility and actionable optimization into the Kubernetes ecosystem.  

StormForge delivered the ML-based optimization; CloudBolt delivered the unified cost visibility and allocation. From the start, both platforms rejected manual methods and embraced full automation. It was only natural that we integrated StormForge into our ecosystem. 

Now with this acquisition, we can go even further and establish a continuous optimization pattern—where a continuous flow of real-time insights, intelligently processed by AI/ML, delivers a stream of changes tuned for your business and constraints—across more areas of the technical stack. 

We don’t see this as a point solution for Kubernetes, but a platform pattern that drives the fastest insight-to-action time in the market. 

Looking ahead to the future 

As the StormForge and CloudBolt products become more deeply integrated, we see ourselves delivering not only the most advanced and comprehensive FinOps solution for the Kubernetes community, but also a FOCUS data platform that delivers the next generation of insights the market is hungry for.  

Just as FOCUS has now become normalized in the FinOps community and the focus (no pun intended) is now on accelerating its adoption, we at CloudBolt are determined to do the same for continuous optimization.  

With StormForge joining CloudBolt, we’re one step closer to making continuous optimization the new normal—and unlocking the next wave of FinOps growth.  

Visit the acquisition hub to explore the full announcement.