Rafay Systems Named as a Cool Vendor in the 2023 Gartner® Cool Vendors™ in Container Management

Recently, Gartner named Rafay a “Cool Vendor” in the 2023 Gartner Cool Vendors for Container Management report. Team Rafay is extremely pleased and elated for having received this recognition.

Gartner research revealed that “by 2027, more than 90% of G2000 organizations running containerized applications in hybrid deployments will be leveraging container management tooling, up from fewer than 20% in 2023.”

So, why do we think Gartner chose Rafay as a Cool Vendor now?

Times Have Changed

First-generation Kubernetes management solutions were primarily built to help companies provision Kubernetes clusters. But just being able to provision clusters doesn’t even come close to solving the real problem: enabling developers and data scientists to spin up modern compute environments on demand while ensuring that requisite controls are in place to ensure that all compute environments comply with enterprise policy, cost controls, RBAC and configuration standards. This additional set of requirements – without which companies cannot scale beyond a few clusters without significant manpower investment – becomes an immense burden as the number of clusters increases.

Enterprise IT departments are finding themselves between the proverbial rock and a hard place: On the one hand, they have business goals with tight deadlines that are increasingly dependent on how quickly developers and data scientists can leverage modern compute environments. On the other hand, they have the immense complexities of Kubernetes and the cloud slowing the business down.

The Role of Platform Engineering

Platform engineering teams have been instituted across the enterprise IT landscape to help eliminate the Kubernetes chaos most companies are now experiencing. Among the many elements of their charter, they are playing a crucial role in ensuring the successful adoption, deployment, and management of Kubernetes within an organization.

The Kubernetes-related goals of an IT platform engineering team encompass a wide range of activities. At a foundational level, platform teams must build a scalable architecture and repeatable processes to support its initial adoption and setup, ongoing management, and standardization of workflows and tools, along with security and governance. Only when these measures are in place can the platform team begin providing self-service capabilities to developers and operations.

These efforts are aimed at ensuring the enterprise can leverage Kubernetes to its fullest potential while maintaining reliability, security, and scalability.

Rafay’s Approach to Kubernetes and Container Management

The Gartner Cool Vendors in Container Management report explains that “As organizations increasingly adopt hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, challenges with operationalizing container platforms and containerized workloads across these environments pose significant hurdles.” and “Container technology adoption is outpacing most enterprises’ ability to support large and complex application deployments.”

Rafay’s customers had previously experienced those challenges. Rafay’s next-gen approach empowers platform teams to provide developers, data scientists, and researchers – across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments – everything they need to leverage cloud and Kubernetes resources effectively – and do so with the control and guardrails enterprises require. This helps enterprises support large and complex application deployments across an increasingly diverse infrastructure.

We couldn’t be more thankful to the enterprise customers that put their trust in us and more proud of our team at Rafay for being named a Gartner Cool Vendor. We are committed to continuing our efforts to be the top vendor in the container management space for years to come.

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Gartner, Cool Vendors in Container Management, By Dennis Smith, Arun Chandrasekaran, Tony Iams, Published 3 August 2023

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