nOps launches Industry's first self-paced Karpenter Lab

Bart: Can you tell us who you are, what's your role, and where you work?

James: My name is James Wilson, and I lead engineering, Vice President of Engineering over at nOps. I've been with the company now for just under four years, so I'm no longer the newest guy around.

Bart: And what do you want to share today?

James: We're here today to share the launch of the first self-paced Karpenter Lab series, which will be announced at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon this year. The 101 lab will be made available to the community while we're at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. We're excited to be part of the community and help customers. By all data points, most organizations are at a decision point where they are already adopting Karpenter or thinking about it. We want to announce a self-paced lab series that gives the community full access to a Karpenter environment and hands-on experience with what we think is the most advanced node provisioning framework on the market today.

What problems specifically does Karpenter Lab series solve? At nOps, we were early to embrace both Karpenter and open source as part of our Kubernetes optimization suite of tools. As organizations become exposed to this technology, one of the biggest barriers is planning migrations. nOps has a suite of capabilities that makes it easy to adopt, configure, manage, and operate Karpenter and Kubernetes clusters at scale. However, we want to ensure that the CNCF community has exposure to understand how Karpenter works, what are some of the latest and greatest configurations that can be brought into their environment, and to truly get ready for that migration by getting themselves to a master level with Karpenter.

What can the community expect? We all know that Karpenter graduated to general availability. We've been working with organizations that have been operating Karpenter in production since it was in alpha. We want to take our experience in helping customers integrate the most advanced autoscaling tools and share the experience we've gained through those migrations so that the experience is smoother, more informed, and leads to optimal outcomes.

Bart: Now, is Karpenter Lab open source and part of the CNCF landscape?

James: Karpenter Lab is a tool that we'll be rolling out. We'll be partnering with our partners at Instruct to provide the tool in fully containerized environments, with no AWS account required, at no cost to the CNCF community. It's not necessarily open source, but it may be one day. For now, it's offered as a free service to the community for people who want to get hands-on with the latest and greatest in Kubernetes optimization.

Bart: Shift it over to nOps more specifically. What is nOps' business model?

James: nOps is a fully automated FinOps platform. Our journey has led us into a space where we focus on empowering our customers to gain deep visibility and automated optimization with their Kubernetes clusters. We have several different business models. We have what we call a shared save model, which allows our customers to adopt our automated tooling, and we quantify the billing based on how much they save, ensuring there's always a return on investment. More recently, customers have been looking at our vCPU-based pricing, which allows them to get all-you-can-eat optimization at a really predictable cost. This includes everything we have: dynamic container rights sizing, a suite of container efficiency and container cost management capabilities, and our market-defining spot capabilities, which allow you to integrate spot into your workloads with total ease and confidence.

Bart: Who are nOps' main competitors?

James: There are a landscape of tools out there that have taken a more proprietary approach. Great tools are out in the market, such as Cast AI and ScaleOps, with maybe a different model. We've chosen to embrace open source in our stack. We always want to approach things where we have the opportunity to meet our customers, our end users, our practitioners - DevOps engineers - and give them the flexibility to integrate with the best and greatest in open source.

Taking it a little bit further, what helps nOps differentiate from the competitors that are out there? Specifically, if we're looking at Karpenter, nOps makes it super easy to deploy, manage, and continuously update your Karpenter configurations. What Karpenter Lab series is going to do is give you an insight into what Karpenter is great at. The breadth of our platform is really what makes the secret to nOps. We own the commitment side of things. We have been leaders in the commitment automation game for years now. By being able to adjust for commitment, introduce spot, and introduce efficiency, you're able to achieve optimum outcomes. Point solutions that really only focus on one of those problems often end up competing with each other for the optimization they think is the best thing. Our approach is that you've got to look at the problem holistically.

Bart: Looking towards the future, what can we expect next from Karpenter Labs and nOps?

James: We're going to be releasing a series of advanced Karpenter Labs after KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, so look out for them at re:Invent this year. From nOps, you can expect continued excellence. We are on a mission to make it easy for engineers to track, quantify, prioritize, and take action on opportunities in their environment. Our goal is to enable engineers to focus on driving initiatives that deliver value to their organization, allowing infrastructure management to become less of a continuous planning exercise. Instead, automation can leverage the best advantages of the consumption-based nature of the public cloud.

Bart: Well, James, looking forward to seeing you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Best of luck. We'll speak soon. Take care.

James: Thanks a lot.