Rafay Systems Adds Templates to Provision Kubernetes Environments

Rafay Systems today added an Environment Manager to its portfolio to simplify the self-service process for developers provisioning full-stack cloud-native software running on a Kubernetes cluster.

Mohan Atreya, senior vice president of products and services for Rafay Systems, said Environment Manager employs a set of templates that Rafay Systems created for its Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) for managing fleets of clusters.

A Rafay Systems survey published today finds 61% of respondents reporting that environment provisioning is a major roadblock to accelerating the timeframe for application deployments, with 25% taking three months or longer to deploy a modern application or service. Nearly half (45%) of respondents are not satisfied or just somewhat satisfied with their current process. The survey polled an equal number of developers and platform engineers in organizations with more than 1,000 employees.

Issues identified by both developers and platform engineers include having to wait on someone else or on a ticketing-based system to provision environments (57%), the fact that there are too many software/service dependencies between the application and environment that need to be tested/approved/validated (49%), that it takes too long to gain/configure/approve access to new environments (30%) and a lack of automation to procure environments or environments that instead must be manually deployed (27%).

The survey finds developers are more likely to be frustrated, unsatisfied or somewhat unsatisfied with the provisioning process (52%) compared with 61% of platform engineers who are very satisfied with their organization’s current process for environment provisioning.

Issues identified by developers include a lack of automation between DevOps and core developer workflows (55%), rolling out environments for applications takes too long (41%), it takes too much time to learn about and stay up-to-date with how to provision environments (36%) and it’s too complicated to provision environments (33%).

Among the 39% of platform engineers that are unsatisfied, issues include the lack of a standard way to deploy and manage environments (43%), it takes too much time and effort to train development teams on how to provision environments (41%), lack of visibility into environment resources including usage, costs and performance metrics (38%) and lack of governance (35%) and too few guardrails around operations (27%).

Nearly all platform teams (94%) and application developers (89%) believe it would be valuable to have a self-service workflow or portal where developers can provision environments themselves.

Automating the provisioning processes is a crucial element of any effort to improve the Kubernetes developer experience, notes Atreya. Achieving that goal requires making it simpler for an IT operations team to use curated templates so developers can provision Kubernetes environments and eliminate the current friction encountered when deploying additional stacks of software on top of a Kubernetes cluster, he adds.

That approach also enables IT operations teams to ensure guardrails are in place at a time when Kubernetes itself is still a relatively new platform in enterprise IT environments, says Atreya.

In general, organizations are starting to employ Kubernetes management platforms more widely to address those issues, notes Atreya. Rafay Systems revealed today it has doubled its annual recurring revenue (ARR), with the number of Kubernetes clusters under its management more than doubling over the past year.

Regardless of the Kubernetes management approach, the number of Kubernetes clusters in enterprise environments is only going grow. The issue now is determining how best to manage them at a level of abstraction that makes sense for both developers and platform engineers alike.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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