The Story of Sedai: Building the Future of Autonomous Cloud Management
Sometimes the biggest leaps of faith lead to the most important innovations. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Suresh Mathew shared the compelling story behind Sedai, a company that’s transforming how enterprises manage their cloud infrastructure through autonomy.
The PayPal Origins
The seeds of Sedai were planted during Suresh’s 13-year tenure at PayPal, where he led one of the world’s largest OpenStack deployments. There, he witnessed firsthand the growing challenges faced by Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) managing increasingly complex cloud environments.
“At PayPal, when PayPal spun off as a separate company, we solved this huge problem of handling the cloud workload and the most reliable and the most efficient way efficient in terms of cost and in terms of performance as well,” Suresh explained. This experience would later become the foundation for Sedai’s approach to autonomous cloud management.
The Leap of Faith
In 2019, Suresh made the bold decision to leave PayPal and start Sedai. “You almost jump off the cliff, assuming there will be water by the time you land,” he described. “That’s always the assumption any founder would take. I knew that the idea was worth pursuing. I knew that PayPal, when I was at PayPal, that was something that was badly needed there and worked pretty well there.”
Crisis as a Catalyst
When the pandemic hit shortly after Sedai’s founding, many might have seen it as a catastrophic setback. Instead, it became an unexpected advantage. “In fact, that was the right time and in fact, it was a favorable time to start a company,” Suresh reflected. “You learn a lot of things being alone. You learn a lot of things being in not so favorable situation. But the good thing is the company is so much more stable and can handle some of these adverse situations since it’s born at that time.”
Solving the SRE Crisis
Sedai’s mission addresses a growing crisis in cloud operations. As Suresh explained, “You’re not managing tens of services anymore. You have hundreds of services to manage as an SRE. Now if you look at the whole thing, it has become a risky job now and many a times it becomes boring as well.”
The platform takes on the most dangerous and repetitive tasks, allowing SREs to focus on higher-value work. “The most important thing is you will take your operators out of harm’s way,” Suresh emphasized. “When an SRE sits there, looks at your application, and has to take an action, most of the risky actions are then taken by the platform itself.”
Building Trust Through Transparency
Recognizing that enterprises would be hesitant to fully trust an autonomous system, Sedai developed a careful approach to adoption. “We are an autonomous system. At the same time, we don’t let you run autonomous in the first two weeks,” Suresh explained. “The first two weeks is for the system to learn and recommend certain things. Those are the things that your teams will evaluate.”
This strategy has proven successful, with over 20 enterprise customers now trusting Sedai with their cloud workloads. The company has built its reputation through “100% transparency” with its community about development and releases.
The Future of Cloud Management
Looking ahead, Suresh’s vision for Sedai is ambitious yet clear: “It will be the autonomous company for everything that is on Cloud,” he stated. Starting with serverless and expanding to “ECS, Kubernetes, and storage,” Sedai aims to become the comprehensive solution for cloud native platforms.
What makes this vision particularly compelling is the shifting market perspective on autonomy. As Suresh noted, “Autonomy was considered risky at one point. Now that’s safer than being automated. So that’s where the market is today… Being autonomous and autonomous is not cool or new anymore. It is becoming the norm now.”
In a world where cloud infrastructure grows increasingly complex, Sedai’s story suggests that the future of management isn’t just automation—it’s true autonomy. Just as autonomous vehicles make driving safer without replacing drivers, Sedai aims to make cloud operations more reliable without replacing operators. It’s a vision that started with a leap of faith at PayPal and continues to evolve through crisis, innovation, and an unwavering focus on solving real problems for cloud operations teams.