With Kubernetes, the Industry is Missing the Forest for the Trees

Previously part of the SRE team at Google, Asim Aslam is the CEO and Founder of Micro. Asim tweeted the above as a reaction to announcements coming out of Google Next 2019.

Asim’s tweet voices what many application owners and developers are thinking: “I want to build apps fast. I need to understand what’s under the hood so I’m confident that the underlying platform will meet my growing needs. But I don’t want to have to look under the hood and get grease under my nails.”

Case in point is the highly marketed Google platform called Anthos. With Anthos, Google Cloud seems to have conceded that Kubernetes is hard to manage, and is therefore selling a centralized control plane to manage Kubernetes clusters running in Google Cloud, on-premise, or in other cloud provider environments. Anthos reduces some of the pain around managing cluster-specific scripts, but doesn’t solve the underlying problem: Companies really don’t want to build in-house expertise around Kubernetes, Istio, and other tools.

Certainly, many companies have capable engineers who can easily delve into Kubernetes and other related technologies, and possibly become experts in all of them if needed. But is this the investment that companies want to make? Or do they want to focus their in-house bandwidth on building apps, like Asim tweeted? The latter, clearly.

Rafay enables companies to run their containerized apps anywhere without having to marry themselves to the complexity, time and effort of developing & maintaining in-house expertise. Much like AWS used to say, “we innovate for you [so you] can innovate for your customers.” We leverage Kubernetes, Istio, Calico, and a variety of other tools to deliver a SaaS platform that anyone can utilize. Companies such as Pivotal initiated the cloud native paradigm, and Rafay will progress this paradigm to the next level of adoption with its supremely developer-friendly and easy-to-use platform.

If you’d like a demo, or would like to try out the platform to experience how easy deploying containerized apps anywhere should be for any of us, please feel free to email me directly.