Independent Cloud Software Infrastructure: A Declaration
In the world of enterprise software, infrastructure has long been a package deal: when you pick your cloud hardware infrastructure provider, you end up having to tailor your enterprise applications to their software infrastructure stack. Not only is that a lot of work, with ample room for error; it also locks you into that hardware infrastructure provider, because you don’t want to do that work all over again in order to migrate from one cloud to another. Ever tried to negotiate with a vendor who knows it’ll cost you millions of dollars to walk away?
But what if you could decouple that equation? What if the software infrastructure layer could be portable—something you take with you, empowering your applications anywhere, on your terms?
This is the shift Cachai enables, and it’s reshaping how businesses think about modernization, operations, and innovation.
The three basic layers that make up an organization’s tech stack: Business Applications depend on Software Infrastructure in order to use Hardware Infrastructure to achieve cloud characteristics.
The Old Way: Bundled Infrastructure
Cloud software infrastructure includes all the foundational software that enables your business applications to run effectively on hardware infrastructure to achieve “cloud-like” characteristics like global high availability, real-time consistency, redundancy, and fault tolerance. This encompasses tools like Terraform for infrastructure-as-code; Kubernetes for container orchestration; Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming; maybe Istio as a service mesh for microservices, maybe Hashicorp Vault for secrets management.
While these tools are theoretically designed to be hardware-agnostic, in practice businesses find that they have to implement and optimize them in highly specific ways for each cloud provider’s hardware and ecosystem. For example, Kubernetes deployments may rely on proprietary services like AWS EKS, Google GKE, or Azure AKS, tying your software infrastructure setup to the quirks and constraints of the chosen provider.
Software Infrastructure is only available in configurations that are so specific to the cloud provider (AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba) that they cannot function on any other hardware.
This specific setup costs millions of dollars up front to configure, and hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year in fees and engineering labor to maintain. It limits portability and flexibility, creating dependencies (some obvious, and some deeply hidden) that effectively lock businesses into a single vendor.
For that reason the market for software infrastructure has always revolved around the cloud vendors. Whether you’re modernizing with the help of a consulting firm like Accenture or undertaking the work in house, there are two strategies, and neither of them is particularly appealing.
Commit to a Cloud Provider: You’re locked into their infrastructure stack, forced to design (or re-design) your application layer to fit their systems. And, this leads to limited flexibility and negotiation power, which can mean skyrocketing costs for the broader cloud resources the entire enterprise consumes.
Enterprise-Grade DIY Systems: Building cloud software infrastructure from scratch demands niche expertise, it takes years, it likely doubles the upfront setup costs, and it carries a very real risk of failure. Large enterprises do this in order to use their own data centers or colocation providers and thereby avoid the skyrocketing costs of the public cloud for their enormous databases and workloads. But sometimes they don’t quite get every piece of it right… and you hear about some breach or failure on the news.
Either way, for a large enterprise (around $500M in annual revenue, between 500 and 5,000 employees) the cost of setting up and maintaining the software infrastructure alone will cost $4-6 million a year, in addition to the $5M - $12M cost of software modernization, if the existing software base is “legacy” and monolithic. This is before even starting to account for the cost of hosting actual business software on cloud servers, storing critical databases on cloud storage, and paying for metered data ingress and egress.
Neither scenario is easy to swallow, and that’s part of why 70% of digital transformations fail.
The New Way: Portable Software Infrastructure
Cachai introduces a third option: a portable, cloud-independent software infrastructure layer.
With Cachai, you don’t adapt to the cloud vendor’s systems; the software infrastructure layer adapts to your needs. Whether operating on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, or even in air-gapped environments, you carry your infrastructure capabilities with you. Finally, you can focus your entire team’s attention on business applications themselves, not on getting them to work well on a particular infrastructure.
Cachai is a cloud-independent Software Infrastructure layer (between the Application layer above and the Hardware Infrastructure layer below). It abstracts the cloud hardware specificity away, so that any application is able to achieve cloud characteristics on any appropriate hardware.
What is the Cachai Platform, Exactly?
Cachai is a software infrastructure platform that consists of turnkey capabilities in messaging & data flow, data synchronization, and consensus-based orchestration, creating a cloud-independent, enterprise-grade control plane and enabling any enterprise application layer to integrate with any software infrastructure.
A DevOps Engineer or Architect might look at this and think we’re adding a layer between enterprise applications, above, and a big block of “infrastructure” below. That’s accurate enough in the traditional paradigm, but we challenge the very idea that software and hardware infrastructure should be linked. We envision a world in which the market provides software infrastructure as its own distinct layer—critical to enabling applications but portable and flexible enough to move across any hardware infrastructure environment. The Cachai Platform makes that possible.
We’re like Platform Engineers for everyone. A company’s Platform Engineering team streamlines complexity and delivers reusable, scalable tools, tailored to that company and their hardware infrastructure provider. We’re approaching the whole market the way a Platform Engineer thinks about a single company—streamlining complexity and delivering tools that are reusable and scalable across the entire economy. Cachai is redefining Software Infrastructure as a product that any company can leverage on any Cloud provider.
And perhaps most importantly, this isn’t just about modernizing to present standards; it’s about future-proofing modernization. By deploying Cachai, businesses not only solve their immediate challenges but also gain a foundational platform that supports long-term operations and delivers updates and improvements in ways that are compatible with their business applications. It’s a leap ahead: not just a new platform for engineers to learn and incorporate, but platform engineering as software.
By addressing these core challenges, Cachai turns software infrastructure into a portable, flexible layer that businesses can rely on, no matter where their operations take place. With Cachai, infrastructure adapts to your needs—not the other way around.