The Importance of a Managed Service for Kubernetes
The last blog post had discussed the need for running a containerized infrastructure as a managed service. In that post, I had written –
Enterprise Architecture is the most difficult thing to get right in a cloud-native world. While organizations plan to deploy digital applications or rehost legacy applications in a hybrid cloud, several complexities present themselves. However, the solutions to these complex undertakings don’t result in a similar set of customer rewards.
This discussion has particular relevance to Kubernetes, which has emerged as the defacto infrastructure and application standard in the cloud. However, Kubernetes is a complex technology and can get complicated to deploy in a large-scale hybrid environment.
The three fundamental & key enterprise use cases in the context of containers remain as follows:
1. Manage and monitor Hybrid Clouds: Manage environments that consist of on-premises, public and private clouds.
2. Cloud-native application development ensures consistency: Leveraging containers and Kubernetes ensures consistency in application development and deployment.
3. Compute resources at the edge: Organizations are finding more and more need for resources to be closer to where information is generated for faster analysis.
Taking the discussion further, the three basic conditions that need to be met by any Managed Service need to be –
- Simple to use and with rapid time to market – no need for any professional services involvement. No need for overhead and ma
- An ability to run production-ready workloads from the get-go
- A 24x7x365 SLA guarantee
Those of us who want to leverage Kubernetes in the enterprise know that words like “managed” and “service” (or “as-a-service”) are often thrown around with enterprise Kubernetes solutions. But they describe VERY different levels – and philosophies – of “management”, and of “service”.
Given this mission statement — when I say managed, I mean fully-managed. When I say Kubernetes-as-a-Service, I don’t just mean a self-service portal for provisioning clusters (that Admins then need to struggle to manage). I mean that the platform (and the additional layer of Operations team who also monitors the environment) needs to do all of the heavy lifting and ongoing operations – so the end customer doesn’t have to.
I am glad to announce that a major initiative that we, at Platform9, have been working on for the last year has finally come to fruition today.
SLAs, without the operational burden:
Platform9 Managed Kubernetes lets you be up and running in less than an hour with enterprise-grade Kubernetes on VMware that just works. It eliminates the operational complexity of Kubernetes at scale by delivering it as a fully managed service, with all enterprise-grade capabilities included out of the box: zero-touch upgrades, multi-cluster operations, high availability, monitoring, and more – all handled automatically and backed by a 24x7x365 SLA.
That is big. It makes Kubernetes a no-brainer, anywhere – providing enterprises with the same experience of the Kubernetes services offered by the public cloud providers, but on their own infrastructure (on-prem, or in the cloud.)
See it in action:
IT Operations and VMware administrators can now enable their developers with simple, self-service provisioning and automated management experience to deploy multiple Kubernetes clusters with a click of a button, that is operated under the strictest SLAs.
Check out this quick demo to see how easy it is to run Kubernetes on VMware:
No Forking!
By delivering 100% upstream open source Kubernetes on VMware with no code forks, enterprises also benefit from the innovation of the open source community and all the Kubernetes-related services and applications, while avoiding cloud lock-in and ensuring portability across environments.
Compliance, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud built-in
Managed Kubernetes needs to be open source, infrastructure agnostic, allowing organizations to run containerized applications instantly, anywhere. It needs to deliver centralized visibility and management across all Kubernetes environments – whether on-premises, in the public cloud, or at the Edge – with quota management and role-based access control. This enables organizations to eliminate shadow IT and VM/Container sprawl, ensure compliance, improve utilization and reduce costs across all infrastructure.
Furthermore, Managed Kubernetes is part of our hybrid cloud platform, which enables organizations to centrally manage VMs, containers and serverless functions on any environment, with a single pane of glass. This provides enterprises a way to easily support Kubernetes at scale alongside their legacy applications, traditional VMs, and serverless functions, for streamlined operations and improved efficiency across all environments and technology stacks.