Datafy.io is a FinOps startup focused on cutting Elastic Block Storage (EBS) costs with roots in all-flash startup E8 Storage.
Tel Aviv-based Datafy.io was founded by CEO Zivan Ori, COO Ziv Serlin, and chief product officer Yoav Ilovich in August 2023. The company has not raised any external funding yet.

Ori was co-founder and CEO of NVMe-access, all-flash storage company E8 Storage from August 2014 until it was acquired by AWS in August 2019. He then became AWS’s director of software development for EBS, leaving in July 2023. Serlin was also a co-founder of E8 and became a principal engineer at AWS when it was acquired.
Ilovich was chief product officer at Fleetonomy, then VP Product for Pagaya Investments, with two-year stints at each, followed by five months as a product advisor to Addressable.io before co-founding Datafy.
According to Datafy advisor Ron Maroley, EBS utilization (assuming the volume is attached to an active machine) can be as low as single-digit percentages. This means – if he’s right – there’s a savings potential of over 90 percent on those resources.
He said that, while there are two to three “immediate suspects” for EBS optimization (such as unattached volumes, volumes attached to stopped machines, or transitioning from gp2 to gp3), EBS use is often overlooked as it requires relatively more effort to monitor and remediate. However, addressing it can lead to significant waste reduction and improved financial efficiency, Maroley. Datafy’s solution is simple to use, we’re told, and requires no developers for deployment.
Ori says there are six types of EBS volume, which can be viewed as pairs – sc1/st1, gp2/gp3, io1/io2 – with different costs and performance levels.

Tracking costs, especially for storage, on AWS can be challenging due to its technical complexity. EBS volumes are priced per GiB per month. Pricing varies by the type of EBS volume. io1/io2 are the priciest, followed by gp2/gp3, and finally sc1/st1. Some EBS volumes, like io1 and io2, charge for provisioned IOPS (input/output operations per second) in addition to capacity. For gp3 volumes, you get a baseline of 3,000 IOPS for free, but you can pay extra for more IOPS (up to 16,000) or bandwidth if needed (the free bandwidth is 125 MiB/s, and you can pay extra up to 1,000 MiB/s).
There are also snapshot costs. “You need to choose between the standard and archive tiers in Amazon S3,” said Ori. “The standard tier is more expensive but offers free and fast retrieval for creating volumes from snapshots. The archive tier is cheaper, but retrieval is slow[er] and incurs additional costs. EBS costs vary by AWS region due to different AWS operational costs, demand and supply, local regulations, and economic conditions. AWS Cost Explorer is a powerful tool that can help you manage your EBS costs effectively. However, one challenge is that EBS costs are hard to find as they are under the ‘EC2-Other’ cost category.”
In Ori’s view:
- From a pure IOPS perspective, you should always use gp3, even if you need to pay for the extra IOPS. gp3 also gives you the flexibility to determine how many IOPS to pay for, which gp2 lacks.
- No matter your requirements, it will always be cheaper to use gp3 rather than gp2.
- For guaranteed high IOPS performance, use io2.
- For streaming applications, use st1/sc1 – older HDD-based volumes. They present a bandwidth-to-capacity-to-cost ratio that still beats SSDs. However, you must make sure that the application uses a large block size (1 MiB is ideal), and is insensitive to IOPS.
Datafy’s Optimization Engine, we’re told, automatically rightsizes a customer’s EBS volumes, ensuring they only pay for what they actually need. It automates the scaling of an EBS volume’s capacity based on actual usage, increasing or decreasing volume size as needed. Datafy claims this process happens without any downtime and requires no manual intervention at the application or file system level. The Datafy software works with EBS storage for Kubernetes clusters.
Sign up for a demo here.