Platform9 has announced that AI startup Norna experienced a ten-fold productivity improvement and a 78% total cost of operations (TCO) reduction after implementing Platform9’s Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service to power the company’s retail fashion AI technology.

Norna turned to Platform9 to solve two major challenges the company was facing in using a public cloud platform – the rapidly escalating costs for its public cloud based infrastructure and the high demands on the team’s time to manage its Kubernetes infrastructure. Platform9 said its Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service provided Norna with the simplest and fastest path to running its production, cloud-native data harvesting, and processing applications, enabling Norna to quickly deploy Kubernetes clusters with a rich set of pre-built, cloud-native services and infrastructure plug-ins.

Since utilizing Platform9 Managed KaaS, Norna improved its customer service, reaching 99.98% uptime for its Kubernetes clusters after a 90% reduction in unplanned downtime. The 78% reduction in Norna’s overall TCO for Kubernetes is attributed to a combination of workload repatriation from the public cloud, reducing cloud costs by 50%, and operations productivity gains by leveraging Platform9’s hyperscale automation, the company said.

Norna’s applied AI technology stack uses Kubeflow, Tensorflow, and Pytorch, and its AI approach includes two types of artificial neural networks – LSTMs (Long short-term memory networks, a form of recurrent neural network (RNN)) and CNNs (convolutional neural networks) for image analysis.