* – This article has been archived and is no longer updated by our editorial team –
Below is our recent interview with Slava Koltovich, CEO at Kublr:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Kublr?
A: Kublr is a Kubernetes platform with all of the needed components to run Kubernetes in production either pre-configured or easily configured out-of-the-box. Most other solutions still require a fair amount of configuration, which is quite complex, demanding a higher degree of in-house Kubernetes expertise. By pre-configuring and streamlining the process, Kublr speeds and eases Kubernetes adoption for the enterprise.
In comparison to the majority of Kubernetes solutions that are primarily focused on applications management, Kublr is focused on minimizing Kubernetes’ operational complexity. Kublr provides IT staff with an easy-to-use platform that allows them to push containerized applications into production in a matter of minutes. In addition, Kublr’s open architecture is designed to be future compatible and not lock you in.
Q: Could you explain the most prominent advantages of your Kubernetes platform?
A: Kublr provides IT teams with everything they need to run Kubernetes in production and at scale out-of-the-box, from deployment to day 2 operations. With Kublr, containerized applications can get up and running from day one and deployed on-premise or across multiple clouds. Additionally, centralized, multi-cluster logging and management across multiple environments is available.
Recommended: InfinityAR Will Be Exhibiting At AWE Event The World’s #1 Event For AR And VR, May 30th – June 1st, Santa Clara CA
Q: With the launch of Kublr 1.8, Kublr is introducing its self-service control plane; tell us something more?
A: The self-service control plane allows users to deploy, run, and manage Kubernetes clusters. It’s really intuitive, allowing IT to easily configure their clusters, choose their target environment, select the number of master and worker nodes, set auto scaling if available, and configure more advanced features such as networking and persistent storage. It displays all clusters at-a-glance and shows the health of your infrastructure and applications.
Q: What kinds of feedback are you getting from users?
A: Our customers’ development teams enjoy that Kublr doesn’t restrict their development tool choices , while operations have been impressed by the speed in which Kubernetes can be deployed. Frank Møllerop, CEO, President of North America, QuestBack, told us that his team was blown away by the fact that they got Kubernetes up and running within a week. His dev team particularly likes the ability to deploy native Kubernetes that supports any complex application development environment with no vendor or cloud lock-in enabling them to leverage the portability of containerized applications.
Adam Levy, VP Information Systems, Intelsat S.A., on the other hand, pointed out that Kublr’s Kubernetes management platform with enterprise-level features like security integration with Active Directory, combined with backup and disaster recovery, offers them the superior reliability their larger customers need.
Q: How does Kublr see the market shaping up, what is driving it forward and what will your role be?
A: There are a number of trends, use cases and IT goals that will influence the development and adoption of Kubernetes. The Kubernetes community is separating out cloud specific functionalities from Kubernetes functionalities to eliminate dependencies and allow features to be developed by cloud providers independent of Kubernetes’ release schedule. Kublr will be able to take advantage of this to improve hybrid capabilities, enable cloud bursting, and provide multi-cloud enterprise functionality. The extensibility options in Kubernetes will allow us to customize deployments for emerging use cases.
We are also seeing cloud native technologies beginning to migrate to on-premise, providing lower cost, private cloud type features that enhance developer productivity. Use cases including data science, AI, and machine learning are beginning to utilize the scaling capabilities of Kubernetes. Support for GPUs and big data applications like Apache Spark is indicative of this emerging trend.
We think there will be a continuing evolution of application architecture from monolithic to three tier to microservices requiring the orchestration capabilities that Kubernetes provides.
Q: How is Kublr planning to edge out its competitors?
A: Most of our competitors have a large amount of technical debt and are re-engineering their solutions to support Kubernetes. Many of them are cloud, OS specific or tied to a certain PaaS. Kublr will continue to leverage enhancement in upstream Kubernetes while providing IT organizations with the operational features they need.
Q: What are your plans for next four months?
A: We will be enhancing Kubl’s capabilities for on-premise deployments running on top of OpenStack and VMWare and implementing hybrid cluster capabilities that are dramatically different than anything in the market today. We are seeing a tremendous interest in the industry to learn more about Kubernetes and our team actively engages in sharing lessons learned and best practices through regular in-person and online online meetups.