Why Rafay

Before beginning our Rafay journey, a number of us on Team Rafay were at another startup called Soha Systems. At Soha, we operated a platform in a multi-cluster (multi-region) environment across multiple cloud provider networks. At the time, multi-cloud wasn’t exactly a hashtag trending on Twitter, but we were living that life because our business required it. The pain we felt back at Soha around building and maintaining a platform was acute, with delays in upgrades/rollouts, etc., being directly attributable to gaps in the platform. Soha’s infrastructure/platform development team was incredibly capable and efficient, yet perpetually in catchup mode.

The platform-related challenges we faced at Soha are not unique. Any company operating (containerized) apps across a number of regions and aiming to automate application distribution, config synchronization, secrets management, log/metrics collection, and other similar tasks, may find itself on a journey to building a platform similar to the one we built at Soha.

We ♥ Kubernetes, But It’s Really Complex!

Since Rafay’s founding in December 2017, we have talked to many companies who have invested an inordinate amount of effort and time trying to get that ideal platform built. These companies started their Kubernetes related journeys with the assumption that it’s going to be a smooth, short ride. Many were surprised by how steep the learning curve was for Kubernetes and the surrounding ecosystem of technologies.

Fortunately, there is growing awareness and acceptance of Kubernetes’ inherent complexity, as well as the complexity of managing the lifecycle of containerized applications. This newfound clarity is leading companies to look for turnkey solutions to address their DevOps pain.

And that’s what we have built here at Rafay: A turnkey SaaS platform that automates the highly complex work DevOps teams do today to manage the lifecycle of their containerized apps running across any number of Kubernetes clusters in cloud and hybrid environments. The Rafay platform delivers an industry-first abstraction and blueprinting framework that lets companies adopt these complex technologies today.

Kubernetes is awesome. We are dedicating our energies and time to making it easy to use by everyone.