Introduction to Platform9 Elastic Machine Pool

In this presentation, Madhura Maskasky, the Co-Founder and VP of Product at Platform9 Systems, introduces their new product called Elastic Machine Pool (EMP). EMP aims to optimize compute utilization and reduce costs for Kubernetes in public clouds by at least 50%. EMP is unique in the market because it addresses the inefficiency of Kubernetes, which often uses only around 30% of its allocated resources.

EMP works by provisioning bare metal nodes and deploying optimized virtual machines on top of them, called elastic virtual machines (EVMs). A rebalancer component ensures even distribution of resources across the pool of bare metal nodes and can live-migrate VMs without disrupting applications. This allows for over-provisioning and better bin packing without compromising application SLAs.

The product targets DevOps, FinOps, and PlatformOps users and fits into the FinOps landscape by potentially reducing EKS costs significantly. EMP is complementary to other tools that provide cost visibility but differentiates itself by improving utilization and eliminating the need to constantly adjust app configurations for cost optimization.

EMP is licensed on a risk-reward model, charging a percentage of the actual savings it generates for customers. The discussion also covers the importance of feedback loops for engineers to understand resource usage better and the potential expansion of EMP to other clouds beyond AWS.

The presentation concludes with an emphasis on the significant potential cost savings that EMP can offer and its ability to operate seamlessly within existing Kubernetes clusters without requiring fundamental changes or app disruptions.