Operational Simplicity with Equinix Metal and Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform

Equinix Metal is a fully automated and interconnected bare metal service that enables organizations to automate hardware deployments across Equinix’s global data center footprint and interconnection fabric. Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for modern applications being deployed and orchestrated across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. To make it easier for Equinix Metal customers to modernize their applications and move to the public cloud or closer to the edge, Equinix Metal has announced a neutral ecosystem of technology partners and solutions to enable customers to more effectively deploy, manage, and operate Kubernetes on Equinix Metal.

Rafay is excited to be a launch partner and enable organizations to take advantage of Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) on Equinix Metal.  Rafay KOP supports a variety of Kubernetes distributions and managed offerings, including Amazon EKS Anywhere and upstream Kubernetes. By delivering a broad set of operational services, not only can platform teams effectively and efficiently manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters and modern applications, they can streamline Kubernetes operations with the following six key services:

 

 

Let’s take a deeper look at each of the Rafay services delivered by the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform:

Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Management Service

Rafay’s K8s Multi-Cluster Management Service provides lifecycle management and simplifies on-demand deployments with blueprints based on a stored spec under version control in your Git repository. This service is foundational for the remaining services and includes support for a broad array of managed Kubernetes services, including Amazon EKS Anywhere, for packaged offerings such as RedHat OpenShift, and even for upstream Kubernetes deployments. Logs/metrics collection, storage management, and secrets management are also integrated across your fleet of clusters rounding out this enterprise-class service.

GitOps Service

GitOps serves as an operating model for developing and delivering Kubernetes-based infrastructure and applications. By being declarative, you can provide better standardization, enhanced security, and ultimately, improved productivity. With Rafay’s GitOps Service, you can:

• Build a multi-stage pipeline for both applications and clusters in minutes
• Fully automate deployments and remove error-prone, manual steps
• Guarantee that the desired state specified in your Git repos are instantly enforced on Kubernetes clusters
• Tightly integrate your Kubernetes management solution with GitOps deployment

Zero-Trust Access Service

Rafay’s Zero-Trust Access Service enables controlled, audited access for developers, SREs and automation systems to Kubernetes infrastructure with just-in-time service account creation and user-level credentials management integrated with your RBAC/SSO solution. By default, kubectl doesn’t provide RBAC and executed commands are not logged by user account. Further, kubectl can be cumbersome to access outside firewalls, and managing more than a handful of clusters becomes complex and error-prone. Rafay’s Zero-Trust Access solves these issues by centralizing and securing access to kubectl from anywhere, governing the use of kubectl by user account. With this Service, you can:

• Centralize kubectl access to your entire fleet with automated RBAC
• Stop rogue Kubernetes admins with user-level audit logs
• Comply with internal security policies & industry regulations
• Make your Security and DevSecOps teams happy

 

Kubernetes Policy Management Service

Centralize control and administration and ensure that K8s clusters are always in compliance with company policies — fleet-wide.  With Rafay, platform teams can automate, test, audit and maintain policies with unified policy definition and enforcement across data centers, public clouds and in remote/edge locations providing:

• Easy to use workflows for creating and managing security policies for the entire fleet of clusters reducing significant operational complexity
• Granular policy enforcement over the entire organization of one or more projects or clusters
• Pre-existing policies covering best-practice enterprise compliance and security requirements
• A comprehensive view of all policy metrics, violations and audits in a central dashboard by clusters, environments and teams

Backup and Restore Service

With Rafay, enterprises leverage an integrated platform for backup and disaster recovery of Kubernetes clusters and application data across data centers, public clouds and remote / edge locations. Platform and operations teams need an easy-to-use, scalable solution for backup/restore, disaster recovery, and migration of Kubernetes applications. Instead of having to build, integrate and support their own backup and restore solution, enterprises are taking advantage of Rafay’s Backup and Restore Service to:

• Centrally configure, automate and operationalize disaster recovery (DR)
• Eliminate manual handling of backup credentials for enhanced security
• Leverage easy to use workflows for creating and managing backups for the entire fleet of clusters
• Have flexible controls to specify what data to include and exclude as part of the backup

Visibility and Monitoring Service

Rafay delivers a comprehensive view of the health of your Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across data centers, public cloud and remote / edge locations. WIth Rafay, enterprise teams remediate and resolve issues faster by:

• Visualizing, monitoring, and managing your global fleet of Kubernetes clusters, applications and user activity
• Automatically collecting and aggregating critical metrics efficiently from 10s or 100s of K8s clusters operating across heterogeneous environments spanning multiple security domains
• Analyzing contextual dashboards optimized for different roles in the organization (executives, managers, cluster admins, developers, DevOps) providing actionable insights into current state and trends
• Identifying K8s cluster and application issues quickly oftentimes reducing MTTR over 60%

The combined Rafay and Equinix Metal architecture helps enterprises take advantage of modern infrastructure with Kubernetes best practices built-in so your teams can take advantage of the following benefits:

• Cost savings from reliance on provisioning infrastructure to building and deploying a holistic Kubernetes solution
• Easy integration into the Kubernetes distribution and cloud of your choice
• Built-in monitoring for your entire fleet of Kubernetes clusters
• Instantly deliver secure, audited access for your organization
• Expert help when you need it

Are you ready to find out why so many enterprises and platform teams have partnered with Rafay to streamline Kubernetes operations?  Sign up for a free trial today.

Need more information on how Rafay runs on Equinix Metal? Learn more details in our documentation.