Platform9 Adds More Tiers to Kubernetes Service

Source:-containerjournal.com

With more IT teams now being required to work from home to help combat the COVID-19 outbreak, the ability to manage Kubernetes clusters remotely via a SaaS platform has become a lot more relevant, adds Maskasky. To achieve that capability, an IT organization simply needs to install Platform9 agent software in its Kubernetes cluster.

In general, Maskasky says it’s clear more organizations are trying to operationalize Kubernetes at scale. The biggest challenge IT teams face is the shortage of Kubernetes expertise available. As such, it remains to be seen whether 2020 is the year that Kubernetes will cross the proverbial chasm in terms of mainstream adoption, especially as the macroeconomic environment continues to evolve. However, as Kubernetes increasingly becomes a de facto standard for running containerized applications, it’s now more a question of when, not if, Kubernetes will cross that chasm.

Competition among providers of managed Kubernetes services is already fierce. There’s no doubt many more organizations are willing to consider managed Kubernetes, given their own current lack of expertise. Platform9 recently reported it has seen the adoption of its managed Kubernetes services nearly quadruple from 2018 to 2019. The company also claims it saw a gross customer renewal rate of 92.7% in 2019. Much of that growth is being driven by IT organizations that don’t want to be locked into any one distribution of Kubernetes provided by a cloud service or other provider, notes Maskasky.

Less clear is to what degree organizations will prefer to continue to rely on MSP if they ever do choose to develop their own Kubernetes expertise. Managed service providers (MSPs) are betting many more organizations will prefer to devote more of their limited resources to building applications rather than managing infrastructure. Of course, in the age of DevOps, it’s not so uncommon to find IT teams managing both applications and infrastructure in a much more integrated fashion.