Across the cloud, companies are embracing the capabilities of Kubernetes, with an eye toward making it run faster, smarter and cheaper.

Platform9 aims to help companies cut costs and foster innovation with its Elastic Machine Pool, a new compute engine for running Kubernetes in the public cloud.

“Our core bread and butter has always been about simplifying complexity and providing the best optimization to run your workloads,” said Madhura Maskasky (pictured), co-founder and vice president of product at Platform9 Systems Inc. “With EMP, you can reduce your costs of running an [Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service] cluster or a form of EKS clusters by about 50%.”

Maskasky spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what EMP could contribute to enterprise technology and the future of cloud computing. (* Disclosure below.)

Maximizing utilization

Kubernetes clusters, a group of nodes running containerized apps, are often less than 30% utilized, according to Maskasky. With EMP, Platform9 looks to tackle that issue.

“Seventy percent of your capacity across your Kubernetes clusters at any given point is just completely going to waste. And you’re paying top dollars … putting that capacity in the public cloud,” she said.

EMP drives cost and efficiency by running Kubernetes clusters on Amazon Web Service’s bare metal — directly on server hardware instead of an operating system. Eliminating extra software components allows Kubernetes to run much faster.

“We come from virtualization,” Maskasky said. “Because we are able to deploy straight at AWS bare metal, now we’re able to bring in a ton of innovation … we put virtualization on top of AWS bare metal, then we create our own layer of VMs, and these become alternate worker nodes.”

With EMP, Kubernetes utilization could increase from about 30% to 70%, Maskasky added. The engine provides a similar experience to technologies such as AWS Fargate but is “infinitely more lucrative.”

The future of the cloud will depend on having the resources to run complex systems, such as those for artificial intelligence and machine learning, Maskasky believes.

“Power is going to become one of the most constrained resources. There’s not going to be enough power capacity to host data centers,” she said. “I think this wave of AI, ML is going to push it even further.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA:

(* Disclosure: Platform9 Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Platform9 nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE