As Kubernetes gains ground as a container orchestration system for modern IT infrastructure, open-source cloud software and services company Mirantis Inc. continues to invest to simplify the experience of developers working in this landscape.

Among Mirantis’ recent announcements is an update to the Lens integrated development environment for Kubernetes, which makes it simpler for multiple developers to collaborate when building cloud native applications.

“Kubernetes IDE has empowered … close to 180,000 Kubernetes developers around the world to make it much, much easier to take advantage of the Kubernetes,” said Adrian Ionel (pictured), chief executive officer of Mirantis. “So, you can think of it as an IDE and a debugger for anybody who was using Kubernetes on public clouds or on private infrastructure.”

Ionel spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during DockerCon. They discussed news on the open-source innovation with Mirantis products and the key trends in the industry changing the game and accelerating cloud native applications. (* Disclosure below.)

Navigating the interactions of different cloud native services

The growing interest of enterprises in Kubernetes comes from the fact that the technology solves some fundamental problems with developers and operators building cloud-native applications, such as availability, scalability and re-usability of services, according to Ionel.

“All of that with Kubernetes comes right out of the box, and developers no longer have to worry about it,” he said.

At the same time, Kubernetes offers developers a standard where they can create applications in public clouds and then move them on-premises or create them on-prem and move them to public clouds or anywhere in between.

“It gives you kind of this universal cloud native standard that you as a developer can rely on,” Ionel stated. “And that’s extremely valuable for developers.”

Lens adds value in this context by providing a kind of “real-time console cockpit” that helps developers navigate the many interactions of different cloud native services while building or running their application.

“You can imagine like you’re a fighter pilot in this jet and you have all these instruments kind of coming at you and give you like this fantastic real-time situational awareness,” he explained. “So, you can very quickly figure out what is it that you need to do, either fix a bug in your application or optimize the performance of your code or make it more reliable, fix such security issues.”

Ops will become ‘Zero Ops’ with automation

As enterprises’ IT infrastructure evolves, so do DevOps practices. The future of DevOps is to get more and more integrated, where Ops will become something like “Zero Ops” and be fully automated and delivered entirely into software, according to Ionel. That way, developers will be able to focus entirely just on creating and shipping code.

“The problem yet … to be solved 100% correctly is the challenge of the last mile, by deploying that code on the infrastructure and making sure that it’s performing correctly to the SLAs and optimizing everything,” he explained.

Although very powerful, this evolution offers a lot of room for complexity that can exceed the capacity of the individual developer or even a group of developers to constantly optimize things.

“So, I believe what we will see is AI and machine learning taking charge of optimizing a lot of parameters, operating parameters around the applications that are deployed on Kubernetes to ensure those applications perform to the expectations of the owners,” Ionel stated.

Automation gets even more important as the infrastructure becomes more modern and distributed with multicloud, data centers and the edge. Some companies can’t afford to have hardcore DevOps groups to manage their processes or can’t find people fast enough to do so.

Mirantis proposes to solve this problem by providing a service experience that guarantees the results, according to Ionel.

“That’s what makes us different versus the traditional enterprise infrastructure software model,” he said. “We deliver everything as a service with guaranteed outcomes through a cloud native experience. That means guaranteed SLAs, predictable outcomes, continuous updates, continuous upgrades; your on-prem infrastructure or your edging infrastructure is going to look and feel and behave exactly like a public cloud experience.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon. (* Disclosure: Mirantis Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Mirantis nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE