Ridge, Hivelocity Ally on Managed Bare-Metal Service
Hivelocity, a provider of cloud services, and Ridge, a provider of managed services, today announced an alliance to make available a bare-metal platform for running cloud-native applications.
Jonathan Seelig, chairman and chief evangelist for Ridge, says this alliance will provide IT teams with access to a managed cloud-native platform based on Kubernetes at a much lower cost than rival hyperscaler providers of cloud services are able to provide.
In addition, Hivelocity provides access to data centers in geographic regions where larger providers of cloud infrastructure services don’t have a facility, notes Seelig. Hivelocity has data centers in 26 countries spanning four continents. The company claims its Bare Metal Cloud can reach 80% of the world’s internet population in under 25 milliseconds.
That’s critical because in many instances cloud-native applications are latency-sensitive, says Seelig, who notes also there are many countries that now require data created by cloud applications to be stored within their borders out of data sovereignty concerns.
Ridge has created a managed service based on a single application programming interface (API) through which it provides access to a curated distribution of Kubernetes that is integrated with an object-based storage system. Organizations can deploy that framework on any public cloud, local data center or edge computing environment, Seelig says.
The company also created a Resource Allocation Engine that makes it easier to deploy applications in specific geographic locations attached with policies that address issues such as cost containment or compliance mandate enforcement.
While most instances of Kubernetes today are deployed on virtual machines, the number of instances of Kubernetes being deployed on bare-metal servers is increasing steadily. As IT teams gain more familiarity with Kubernetes there is a greater willingness to deploy Kubernetes on bare-metal servers to eliminate the overhead a virtual machine can generate.
In general, more organizations are opting for a third party to manage cloud-native infrastructure to enable them to focus more of their time and energy on building cloud-native applications, says Seelig. It’s not clear to what degree IT infrastructure might one day be consumed as a service, but given the complexity of Kubernetes, there are many organizations that lack the internal IT skills required to manage it. In addition, many IT teams no longer have the skills and expertise required to manage bare-metal servers after relying solely on virtual machines for more than two decades.
Most organizations likely will deploy Kubernetes on a mix of virtual machines and bare-metal clusters depending on the latency sensitivity of the application workload running on a cluster. As a result, from an infrastructure perspective most cloud-native application environments will be more challenging to manage than legacy monolithic applications running on virtual machines. It will be up to each IT team to decide whether and how much they want to rely on external expertise to manage Kubernetes clusters, but given the current shortage of cloud-native expertise a managed service may be the only really viable option.
