Ion Stoica, the cofounder of Databricks, has a new startup called SkyPilot. The pitch is disarmingly simple: companies need computers, different providers sell those computers, switching between them is painful and expensive, so SkyPilot makes it easy to use any of them.
In Stoica’s own words, the result is “more compute, better compute, cheaper compute.”
What SkyPilot actually does
SkyPilot originated from UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, where Stoica and cofounder Zongheng Yang developed the framework as an open-source project. The core research paper was presented at the NSDI 2023 conference, and the underlying concept is what the team calls “sky computing.”
SkyPilot lets companies run AI workloads across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and specialized providers as if they were a single, unified resource pool. Instead of signing a long-term contract with one cloud provider, companies can dynamically shift workloads to wherever compute is cheapest or most available at any given moment.
