Rafay Systems has been recognized as a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Container Management

Rafay Systems has been recognized as a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Container Management

Rafay Systems has been recognized as a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Container Management.* We believe that being included in this market guide report underscores that Rafay’s global customer base and Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) teams recognize value in the company’s unique approach for operating Kubernetes infrastructure and modern, containerized applications.

This Market Guide reports: “The container management market has seen accelerated growth over the past year. The market is forecast to reach $1.4 billion by 2025, with a 25.1% CAGR.”
It also states that, “The number of container management solutions supporting containerized workloads continues to expand. I&O leaders must navigate this complex marketplace to support agility, modernization and transformation.”

In addition to the strategic guidance, market overview and forecasting information within this report, we think several key findings and trends aligned with what Rafay is seeing in the market and from its customer base.

Takeaways and Trends for Container Management

Below are four topics that all enterprises should consider for managing infrastructure, operations, and cloud management initiatives.

1. Hybrid and multicloud use cases are growing:

The past few years alone has broadened the focus on public cloud offerings. Many enterprises are becoming more open and attracted to hybrid and/or multicloud environments, especially given a wider adoption of Kubernetes to enable these environments.

Enterprises need to be aware that while container management providers offer services to support Kubernetes, avoiding lock-in or dependencies that inhibit easy portability can present long-term challenges. Leveraging a public cloud vendor’s own container management software, while an important consideration for a hybrid cloud model, also relies upon the operational ability of I&O teams to extend and manage this technology from the cloud to on-premises environments.

Enterprises should note that this market guide says, “Emerging solutions offer the ability to operationalize management across these different cloud environments through a multi-environment control panel.”

2. Enterprises desire the unification of container management activities:

According to this market guide: “A primary container management decision facing many enterprises involves selecting container management software that allows unifying activities across different cloud environments or leveraging native container management services.”

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, depending on the current operational capabilities of I&O teams. For example, management software that allows for the use of any desired cloud infrastructure for containers can help unify operations but can also potentially limit the consumption of native services within a specific cloud environment if capabilities are limited for end users.

On the other hand, a hyperscale cloud vendor model can address the challenge mentioned previously through deeper technology integrations. If a multicloud approach is desired however, the burden of managing different cloud environments can create operational complexity for I&O teams, often requiring additional management overhead and resource allocation.

Unifying lifecycle management requirements for both Kubernetes infrastructure and containerized applications is critical as the adoption of these technologies grows. Enterprises should consider solutions that help them take advantage of using any cloud infrastructure, while easing the challenges of managing these different environments.

3. Container management expertise remains limited. Platform Teams to the rescue:

Today, enterprises are developing and deploying modern applications more than ever. But the operational cost, complexity and resources required to manage the lifecycle of container-based infrastructures, and the applications running on them, are spiraling out of control.

To address these challenges, companies are establishing internal platform teams to leverage existing point solutions and build in-house operations practices. These platform teams span multiple internal organizations (e.g., enterprise architecture, SRE, DevOps and security) to manage the inherent complexity of these environments.

According to the Market Guide, “Many enterprises are aggregating support within a platform engineering/operations group that sits between the application development groups and organizations providing infrastructure (that is, I&O and/or cloud providers). Such groups become efficient versus having support distributed among multiple application development groups.”

Presently, platforms teams are making do with disparate tools and internally developed code, but this approach can still cause modern application initiatives to fall behind schedule and remain over budget. Platform teams are increasingly looking to augment their approach with a shared services model that allows them to carry out their function easily, and enable faster deployments of new apps to production, reduce app downtimes, and eliminate security and compliance risk associated with their infrastructure.

4. Improved support for edge computing use cases:

A key area of focus for container management vendors is extending support for use cases at edge or remote locations. “Containers increasingly are being adopted along with, or instead of, virtual machines (VMs) for the edge because containers are more adaptable to modern application architectures and more convenient for updating software at the edge,” according to the market guide.

If the volume of container activity at the edge continues to increase, Kubernetes will remain the preferred orchestration layer for enterprises needing the ability to provision and operate applications at edge/remote locations. To address the complexity of managing edge applications, enterprises will need repeatable deployment methods for launching Kubernetes clusters in stores or factories. In addition, enterprises will need a way to standardize their clusters across edge and multi-access edge computing (MEC) nodes, while centrally securing cluster access to ensure all operations comply with internal and industry regulations.

Why Rafay Believes its Kubernetes Operations Platform Rises to the Top

Kubernetes is complex and difficult to master. Professionals with deep expertise in Kubernetes remain hard to find. According to the Market Guide: “Few enterprises have the expertise to build their own software offering.”

As the leading operations platform for managing Kubernetes environments, Rafay integrates seamlessly with managed services from Amazon (EKS), Microsoft (AKS) and Google (GKE), along with Kubernetes platforms such as RedHat OpenShift and VMware Tanzu.

Enterprises can use any Kubernetes distribution and make these toolsets operationally ready for consumption by leveraging centralized automation, security, visibility, and governance capabilities from Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform.

Looking for a modern approach to Kubernetes cluster and application lifecycle management — across public clouds and remote/edge locations? Rafay offers a broad set of services needed to accelerate innovation across both Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications:

• Multi-Cluster Management Service: Enables the lifecycle management and blueprinting support for managed Kubernetes services, such as Amazon EKS and Azure AKS, as well as offerings such as Rancher and RedHat OpenShift.
• GitOps Service: Enables continuous infrastructure orchestration and application deployment through multi-stage, git-triggered pipelines.
• 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.
• Kubernetes Policy Management Service: Enables policy management for clusters via the Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework for Kubernetes security and governance.
• Backup & Restore Service: Enables disaster recovery and migration of the Kubernetes control plane and application data.
• Visibility & Monitoring Service: Enables development, operations, and security/governance teams to visualize and monitor modern apps and underlying Kubernetes infrastructure through dedicated dashboards.

Learn more about Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform and get started for free at: https://rafay.co/start/.

*Gartner, “2022 Market Guide for Container Management,” by Dennis Smith, Wataru Katsurashima, 15 March 2022.

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