Aaron Rallo, CEO of TSO Logic, announced that his company has been acquired by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The deal was sealed in late December. The parties involved aren’t revealing the purchase price.

Vancouver-based TSO Logic was founded in 2013. Its cloud software is designed to “find the optimal spot to place each and every workload,” according to its website.

Its technology ingests millions of data points from an enterprise’s IT environment. Those data points include age, generation, and configuration of all hardware and software as well as each instance’s historical use. The software then creates a fine-grained statistical model of compute patterns for all instances, showing how much they cost, where they’re over-provisioned, and where there are opportunities to realize savings. TSO Logic can determine the best fit for each workload from thousands of potential options, including public and private cloud.

“Together with AWS, we are excited to go further with our mission to simplify cloud planning and IT transformation,” wrote Rallo on the company's homepage.

This is an interesting acquisition for AWS, a public cloud provider, that has been criticized along with other public clouds for their high costs. Previously, it would have seemed counterintuitive for AWS to help customers save money by placing workloads on private clouds. However, in November 2018, AWS announced a new offering — AWS Outposts — that will help customers connect their on-premises environments to AWS’ services in the public cloud.

Via Outposts, AWS will offer configurable compute and storage hardware for customers to run in their private data centers. AWS is partnering with VMware for Outposts. This is an extension of their ongoing relationship first announced in 2017 when the two companies introduced VMware Cloud on AWS, which was touted as a way for VMware customers to run their workloads in the public cloud using their existing VMware software stack.

With its entry into the private data center ecosystem, it now makes sense for AWS to help customers place their workloads more cost-effectively.

AWS hasn’t made that many acquisitions. But it’s kicking off the new year with some M&A activity. Just last week, AWS purchased CloudEndure, an Israel-based company that does disaster recovery, backup, and data migration.