 Hey everyone, welcome to the AWS startup showcase analytics and cost optimization. This is season three episode two of our ongoing series that highlights exciting startups in the AWS ecosystem. I'm your host Lisa Martin and one of our alumni is back with us JT Geary, the CEO at Enhob. So he's here to talk about Enhob's NKS or Enhob's Carpenter solution. JT, great to have you back on the program. Thanks Lisa. Thanks for having me and looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, me too. Tell me a little bit about Carpenter. We are talking about the launch of NKS or the Enhob's Carpenter solution. Talk to me a little bit about Carpenter. I know it simplifies Kubernetes infrastructure, but I want to understand it a little bit more and then walk us through the Enhob's Carpenter solution, key features, that sort of stuff. Yeah, that sounds good. So yeah, just maybe if folks are not familiar with Enhob's, we are a fully automated Finals platform. We have a unique pricing model. The platform is completely free and we take a percentage of the savings. So we're always looking for ways to optimize customer spend. And we see a lot of the workloads moving to containers, particularly to Kubernetes. And we see an opportunity to have a bigger impact for companies who are running their workloads on Kubernetes. So this is Carpenter and Enhob's Carpenter solution is our way of optimizing spend for our customers. And we do it in a way, everything we do on Enhob's, we focus on automation where a customer doesn't have to go look at a report and take action. So, you know, NKS is our Carpenter solution, which automatically looks at the spot pricing. It looks at your reserve instances commitments. It looks at your saving plans and it picks the right nodes to save you the most amount of money. Let's unpack that a little bit. Talk to me about NKS. How does it really help organizations to simplify EKS management? Talk to me about how it's going to help organizations to really optimize their AWS costs. Yeah. So most of the customers, especially if they're running EKS, which is the elastic Kubernetes service from AWS, most of the customers leverage EKS to run their Kubernetes environment. And, you know, they leverage this scheduler or provisioner called cluster autoscaler. Cluster autoscaler is kind of constrained by node groups. So whenever you're scaling up your infrastructure is kind of constrained by, you know, instance types. When it's launching new pods, essentially first it's launching the infrastructure, then it's retrofitting your application to the infrastructure. So AWS launched this open source solution called Carpenter. Carpenter kind of frees you up from this node group and autoscaling constraints. So, you know, whenever you're, so rather than launching infrastructure and retrofitting your application, Carpenter actually launches your infrastructure based on your application requirements. And within KS we take it even one step further where we make sure that Carpenter is aware of your reservist's reservations and is aware of your savings plan, the reservations. And we also reconsider pricing real time to make sure we pick the best optimal costs, optimal instances types and to save you most amount of money. In many cases we can reduce your EKS cost by like 50% without actually requiring a lot of engineering work. So that's a considerable amount of savings. Help me understand some of the gaps or the challenges with existing EKS autoscalers that NOP saw and said, we can fix this. Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the customers who are running their Kubernetes workload using EKS, they're moving more and more those customers are moving to Carpenter because that is better way and better provisioner for EKS workloads because it's more closer to Kubernetes API, it's provisioning resources based on your application requirements. And we saw an opportunity where as we see a lot of customers migrating to Carpenter's, and as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, our main focus is how do we optimize customers spend. And we saw a gap where a lot of the customers who end up running, let's say if they were running workloads on spot, if they have savings plan commitments they made or reserve instances, they were actually losing money. So we saw an opportunity where we could do this kind of automatically and pick the best cost optimal node types so customers doesn't have to think about it. One of the things Lisa, we think about a lot is we believe that engineers should focus on innovation. They should not spend a lot of time learning AWS pricing plans and see if the spot price is cheaper right now. And so we build solutions and bring solutions to the market that free up engineers to focus on innovation. Which is exactly what they want to be doing to your point. They're not experts on AWS pricing nor should they be. So it sounds like from an alignment perspective that NKS and Nops and what you guys are doing are really kind of bridging some of the gaps between engineering and Phenops because I know that that's the challenge. They don't typically speak the same language but it sounds like you guys might be an enabler of that relationship. Absolutely. So I do believe Lisa, like I feel like we're in very early stages of Phenops. You know, I was migrating companies to AWS when EC2 was in beta. And in those days, we used to see, you know, presentations from like Netflix and other companies. They used to say, oh, you know, we deploy code thousands of times a day. And then we used to scratch our head like, like, how are you doing that? Right? And nowadays, you know, deploying code multiple times became like a norm because there is, you know, a lot of adoption of DevOps, but there's also better tooling. I believe we're kind of in the early stages of Phenops. We do need to empower engineers so they can take actions. Right now, engineers are, you know, they focus, they have product to build, they have feature set, right? They have roadmap to deliver on. They might not have time to learn AWS pricing plan like I said earlier. So we have to provide better automation so we can empower them so they can focus on things that's actually going to generate revenue for the company, you know. So that's our focus. We focus a lot on building experiences and leverage more automation so all this stuff could kind of happen on autopilot. I like that autopilot. I saw that on the website. I'm like, I'm going to understand that. That's a fantastic term. You mentioned a number of really good terms, autopilot, awareness, empowering engineering, real time, all critical today. Talk to me about some of the use cases where NKS is a perfect fit. Yeah, most of the customers, as I mentioned earlier, our whole idea is like we empower companies to focus on innovation. So if you're running workloads on AWS, the platform is completely free. I highly encourage you to try it out, you know, if we save you money and, you know, we just take percentage of the savings. So it's worth a shot. We overlay anything you are doing, we overlay our tech on top of it so we don't disrupt anything you're doing internally. As far as the best fit, you know, if you're running Kubernetes workloads on AWS, if you're thinking about optimizing your costs, if you're thinking about moving to Carpenter, we have a lot of customers who are thinking about moving to Carpenter. If you have the reserve instances and savings plans, and you want to make sure that if you move to savings plan, it's not going to eat into your capacity. If you kind of, you know, say yes to any of these things I just mentioned, I highly, you know, encourage you to try it out. Excellent, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. Now let's talk about how NKS integrates with Carpenter and the value that it provides to EKS clusters. Yeah, so basically, we're managing the Carpenter configuration for you. This is like Carpenter configuration on autopilot. One of the challenges with Carpenter is, you know, let's say you're running Spot, if you're running resources on Spot, it does not reconsider Spot pricing real time. We look at your, we look at the Spot market and we see if this instance type is the best instance type, the cheapest instance type. And we also are aware of your reserve instances, we ingest your curve file. We also worry of your savings commitments, and then based on all this data, we are manipulating, we're updating your Carpenter config and picking the best configuration for you to save you the most amount of money. So one of the, one of the things I want to mention is because we're leveraging Carpenter, so there's no vendor lock-in. If you ever decide to not use an ops for whatever reason, you can manage the Carpenter config yourself. That is not true with some of the existing vendors. Most of the vendors in the market use proprietary technology to, you know, to run your workloads on Spot or other kind of automation. So that was one of the decisions we made. We wanted people to have total freedom if for whatever reason they're not happy with an ops, they can just still leverage Carpenter themselves. That's a really important point because, you know, every company pretty much talks about no vendor lock-in, and then you have to peel the layers of the onion to see what is that actually mean. But it sounds to me like what you've built there is really a differentiator. I'd love to understand some of the motivators to develop NKS. I know this launched recently in the last month or so, but what were some of your motivations as a company? Yes. Yes. Very exciting, Lisa. So basically we've been developing this for a while. As I mentioned earlier, because, you know, we're a pin-offs automation platform, because we only get paid if we have an impact on your environment. We take percentage of the savings. We always look for ways where we can save you the most amount of money. So we look at the cloud data. We have billion dollars of AWS spend that flows through our platform. And we analyze the data and we see where can we save customers the most amount of money. And we notice more and more workloads are going to Kubernetes and we really thought, okay, this is an area where we can have a big impact. All the existing solutions in the market are proprietary, so we decided to pick open source solution. And it's exciting, you know, we were onboarding as a lot of customers as fast as we can. There's a lot of interest because everyone is trying to, a lot of customers are moving to Carpenter. And then we also realize a lot of customers spend a lot of time just managing Kubernetes and Carpenter config. And yeah, then everyone's like, hell yeah, you know, let's try it out. Yeah, I love it. So you talked a little bit about some of the impact, but talk to me about some of the business impact that the launch of NKS is going to deliver to organizations that are moving to Kubernetes, their approach to EKS management, AWS optimization. What impact do you as CEO expect to see? Yeah, one of the things that's unique about Nops in general, we are not a point solution. We provide a complete Phenoms platform starting from providing visibility. You know, we have showbacks and charge back type of functionality, and we give that functionality for free. And then we look at resources that could be paused off hours like your dev environments, your sandbox, you know, staging, and then we provide one click solution that your developers could use to pause these resources. And now we provide NKS where if you're running resources on Kubernetes, which most of the customers are, especially if you're running out on EKS, we provide sort of autopilot configuration management for Carpenter where we can pick the right note type so you can save the most amount of money. And in the back, in the backbone, we're looking at your commitments, we're looking at your savings plan commitments and reserve instances, and we're adjusting those accordingly. Lisa, that is, you speak with a lot of customers, that is so hard to do, because a lot of the customers, they make these commitments. And then they're worried about not moving to SPOT and then they worry about not moving to server less because they made these commitments, right? Where with NKS, we adjust those automatically, you know, so once again, I think the benefit here is more holistic. We provide a complete Phenoms platform where engineers could just focus on innovation while we optimize their cost on autopilot in many different areas, you know, like on Kubernetes or pausing dev environments, managing their commitments. So the word of the day is optimization. I also thank you as you talked about empowering engineering to really be the innovators that every organization needs them to be. You mentioned onboarding lots of customers just in the last month or so. Where can folks go to get started with NKS? Yeah, just on our site and the platform is completely free. And, you know, if you sign up for NKS, we require read-only, we use read-only role to look at your billing data. And then after we adjust the data, we can show you how much money we can save you. And, you know, pretty much most of the customers move forward after they look at the savings. Well, music to their ears, saving 50% or more is huge. JT, thanks so much for joining us on this version of the AWS startup showcase. Congrats on the launch of NKS. We look forward to following its success. Thank you, Lisa. I appreciate it. My pleasure. We want to thank you for watching. And of course, keep it right here on theCUBE for more great content. The theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.