Cloud Field Day – Infrastructure Matters on the Road

During Cloud Field Day 19, Infrastructure Matters hosts Steven Dickens and Camberley Bates, alongside industry experts Stephen Foskett and Keith Townsend, explored the use case for presenters NeuroBlade, SoftIron, and Platform9. Each contributes a unique on-premises and cloud solutions aimed at optimizing infrastructure performance and management. The discussions, rooted in technical expertise, provide a comprehensive look into the role of these companies’ technologies in shaping the future of IT infrastructure. Listen to the entire webcast from The Futurum Group for more!


Runaway K8 Clusters, Meet Your Match: Platform9’s Elastic Machine Pool (EMP)

Although Jim Czuprynski prefers monolithic architectures like Oracle’s Exadata, as an experienced Oracle DBA he recognizes the common issue of memory over-allocation in containerized environments, driven by the containerization trend. Platform9’s EMP toolset was presented as a solution which introduces an alternative virtualization layer, streamlining resource usage and potentially curbing the over-provisioning habits of Kubernetes engineers. With a focus on enhanced performance and cost efficiency, EMP’s potential to optimize Kubernetes configurations was highlighted at Cloud Field Day, a novel approach eagerly eyed by those in cloud resource management.


CFD19 – Get Dollars Back in Your Pocket With EKS Optimisation

With many Kubernetes clusters running at utilization levels of 30% or less, Platform9 emerges as a cost-saving champion, offering strategies to improve efficiency and reduce wastage in EKS clusters. Platform9’s mission to democratize cloud computing was highlighted at Cloud Field Day 19, where Matt Allford learned about their new Elastic Machine Pool (EMP) offering, a tool designed to optimize compute utilization and potentially halve cloud costs. EMP offers seamless integration with EKS, promising minimal disruption, while Platform9’s business model aligns their profits with customer savings, creating a shared incentive to reduce cloud spend effectively.


Kubernetes With Platform9’s Elastic Machine Pool

Platform9’s Elastic Machine Pool (EMP) for AWS addresses the critical issue of EKS cluster underutilization, offering Kubernetes operations enhanced efficiency and cost-effectiveness. By dynamically rebalancing resources and leveraging advanced virtualization, EMP can potentially cut AWS costs in half for EKS users, presenting a considerable advantage for both DevOps and #FinOps teams. Beyond the cost benefits, EMP’s intelligent resource management promotes operational efficiency, allowing teams to devote more time to innovation instead of the manual oversight of cloud resources, according to Jon Myer.


Auto-Optimizing EKS Utilization With New Elastic Machine Pool From Platform9

Platform9’s Elastic Machine Pool (EMP) is an innovative response to the costly challenges of over-provisioning in the cloud, introduced at the Cloud Field Day event to enhance EKS deployment efficiency. EMP expertly tackles the pervasive issue of low utilization rates in Kubernetes environments, promising to virtually halve EKS costs while maintaining application SLAs by optimizing EKS cluster utilization via an intelligent, hands-off approach. Platform9’s solution signifies a major step towards cost-effective cloud management, ensuring resource optimization without compromising on performance, with aspirations to extend this savvy tool beyond AWS EKS, offering broad appeal to enterprises looking to streamline their cloud operations.


Saving Money in EKS Is a Good Start

Cloud elasticity, allowing for scaling out and in, can lead to cost inefficiency when resources remain underutilized, a situation exacerbated in Kubernetes environments with studies citing overprovisioning as a significant issue. Ned Bellavance discusses Platform9’s Elastic Machine Pool (EMP), which seeks to address excessive resource allocation in EKS by optimizing node placement and memory on AWS EC2 instances, potentially leading to substantial cost savings. However, while EMP is a clever intermediary fix, the underlying challenge of workload right-sizing and application team behavior remains, signifying the need for a more profound, long-term solution.


Platform Engineering & FinOps Converge

Platform9 stands at the forefront of innovative Kubernetes management, blending platform engineering expertise with FinOps principles to tackle over-provisioning and optimize resource allocation. Their Managed Kubernetes service revolutionizes deployment and operational management, enhancing both operational efficiency and financial optimization for enterprises. With the introduction of Elastic Machine Pool—targeting AWS EKS clusters—Platform9 commitments to substantial cost savings and improved compute utilization, evidencing a future where technical prowess meets financial prudence in cloud infrastructure management. Read more in this analyst note from The Futurum Group by Steven Dickens and Camberley Bates.


Is Platform9’s Cost Optimization Worth Its Complexity?

At Cloud Field Day 19, Platform9 introduced their Elastic Machine Pool (EMP), a sophisticated solution dedicated to optimizing cloud costs through a unique utilization of AWS bare metal and a KubeVirt-based virtualization layer for Kubernetes. While EMP can provide significant savings for those with resource over-allocation, it introduces layers of technological complexity that could lead to technical debt, raising the question of whether the cost savings justify the added intricacy. Joep Piscaer elaborates on the delicate balance between addressing organizational inefficiencies with technical solutions, suggesting that while EMP has its merits, a holistic approach to understanding and resolving the root causes behind over-provisioning may yield more sustainable outcomes.


Stop Paying for Resources You Aren’t Using

In this LinkedIn Pulse article, Thomas LaRock advises against over-provisioning cloud resources, comparing it to a rule from a basketball camp: “Take all you can eat. But eat all that you take.” He highlights the common practice of requesting more resources than necessary, leading to wasted resources and higher costs. LaRock introduces Platform9’s Elastic Machine Pool (EMP) as a tool to identify and optimize inefficient Kubernetes deployments, potentially reducing costs by up to 50%. He suggests that managing cloud resources is more of an art than a science and recommends tools like EMP for effective cost optimization, particularly in Kubernetes deployments.


EKS Cost Optimization From Platform9

As Ken Nalbone writes, Platform9 has re-emerged at Cloud Field Day with significant updates to their product suite, emphasizing their commitment to democratizing cloud computing with a focus on private and edge clouds. Their new Elastic Machine Pool (EMP) solution caught the spotlight, tackling the persistent issue of Kubernetes cost optimization, contrasting typical FinOps strategies by targeting both cost-saving and compute optimization. Platform9’s proactive approach, exemplified by EMP’s ability to efficiently scale resources on AWS without disruptions, underscores a pragmatic recognition of the organizational challenges in application optimization and presents a tailored niche in the cloud management market.


Performance Optimization (Platform 9 Edition)

Performance optimization is critical for ensuring the efficiency and efficacy of applications, whether they are deployed on the cloud, using bare metal, or with Kubernetes, as highlighted by Michael Levan. At the heart of performance optimization are three key questions regarding the expected performance, knowledge of how applications are performing, and data to understand this performance, all of which are addressed in this insightful blog post. Platform 9 offers tools like Proactive Ops and Elastic Machine Pool (EMP) to aid in these efforts, providing a robust management plane and smart scaling solutions to maintain optimal resource utilization and reduce costs.


VMworld 2021 – Bringing It All Together With Project Ensemble

On his personal site, Architecting IT.com, Chris Evans writes his takeaways from VMware’s VMworld 2021. Specifically, he compares VMware’s Project Ensemble, displayed at the event, to other products such as those presented at a past Cloud Field Day event by Morpheus Data, in a past Tech Field Day appearance by Platform9, and the products displayed by ZeroStack during a Virtualization Field Day event, which he attended at as a delegate. Click the link below for more context behind these comparisons.


Cloud Field Day 2 – A lesson learned

Last summer, Lino Telera attended his first Cloud Field Day. While the presenting companies showed off a vast array of products, platforms and solutions, for Lino the overall theme came down to being more dynamic with data across the cloud. He gives his impressions of all the presenters, from HPE’s Nimble Cloud Volumes to Nirmata’s SaaS solution to close the gap between developers and sysadmin.


Why the hybrid IT control plane is destined for the public cloud

Cloud growth is exploding, but analysts have shown that compared to a traditional data center, it can be much more expensive in the long haul. That’s why Keith Townsend things a hybrid IT approach will allow organizations to leverage the agility of the cloud without the cost associated with a complete migration. Keith takes a look at some SaaS-based data center control planes from Platform9, Skyport Systems, and HPE to compare their strategies for hybrid IT management.


Are We Really Concerned with Public Cloud Vendor Lock-in?

Fear of public cloud lock-in is real for many companies. Eric Shanks looks at why this is, why this fear is historically overblown, and also what the advantages of keeping your options open actually are. He then reviews how three companies he saw at Cloud Field Day last month, Scality, Platform9, and Nirmata, address the lock-in question.


Cloud Field Day 2: Event Summary

Bryan Krausen recaps Cloud Field Day, giving a quick review of each company’s presentation and relaying his thoughts on the event as a whole. He enjoyed most of the presentations, but found that each of the three days of the event had a different theme, from startups to industry giants. Bryan is thankful to have had the opportunity to attend Cloud Field Day and looks forward to more Field Day events in the future.


Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Platform9

Julian Wood introduces Platform9, a regular Field Day event presenter returning for Cloud Field Day this month. First, he outlines their past products before moving into what he is most interested in hearing more about, Open Source and Serverless.


Openstack made easy: Platform9

A lot of organizations look to move to OpenStack, but are put off by apparent complexity that will require additional personnel. Raff Poltronieri reviews what he saw from Platform9 at Tech Field Day, a SaaS solution for OpenStack that makes it a much more accessible and affordable solution.


Platform9 Simplifies Cloud Infrastructure

At Tech Field Day, Platform9 presented on their unique cloud solution. Rich Stroffolino came away impressed. It’s essentially a service for easing the setup and maintenance of a private or hybrid cloud. This can make the deployment of OpenStack and Kubernetes done in a matter of minutes, with none of the maintenance headaches to worry about down the line.


On-Premises Serverless

Alastair Cooke looks at what is required to adopt serverless architecture in your data center. While services like AWS Lambda provide this for the public cloud, it isn’t as evident how to do this on-premises. Alastair breaks this down really clearly, essentially for serverless operation, you need to be able to quickly spin up and coordinate containers in response to external triggers. He quickly gives an overview of offerings from IBM and Iron.io that provide Functions as a Service. But Platform9 offers a managed serverless platform on top of an existing managed cloud environment. Their Fission solution (currently in alpha) essentially offers a managed serverless platform on top of the managed Kubernetes platform. This gives you the scale of Platform9 as a cloud provider, but you can have all of your containers on-premises. It’s a really interesting approach to the problem.