A general sentiment still persists that there’s just too much stuff in Kubernetes, despite industrywide efforts toward effortless application scaling with the open-source container management platform.

To address the growing complexity, Platform9 Systems Inc. has come up with a “cloud-native at scale” solution called Arlon, an open-source project that combines different building blocks, including Argo CD, GitOps and Kubernetes. The goal is to enhance the configuration, deployment and management of clusters and infrastructure at scale.

During the recent “Cloud Native at Scale” event on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, Platform9 executives discussed how Arlon tackles these Kubernetes complexities, as well as how the supercloud model is providing enhanced business outcomes. During the event, theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier led sessions highlighting how Platform9 is accelerating the cloud-native and supercloud cloud architecture models for modern scalability.

“Cloud-native at scale, enabling next-generation cloud or supercloud for modern application cloud-native developers — it’s changing the landscape of infrastructure as code. It’s accelerating the value proposition,” Furrier said in his introduction to the event, adding that th eevent discussion also focuses on “Arlon, the open-source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud-native at scale.”

Expert guests included Platform9’s Bhaskar Gorti (pictured), chief executive officer; Bich Le, co-founder and chief architect; and Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and vice president of product. (* Disclosure below.)

In case you missed it, here are three key insights from the “Cloud Native at Scale” event:

1) The days of solving complexity with more complexity are long gone.

The old way of doing things seemed to tackle complexity with yet more complexity. With open-source contributions, a new power dynamic is emerging for software developers geared toward speed and simplification. To this end, open source has prompted the cloud-native-at-scale approach, which seeks to blend, simplify and solve Kubernetes configuration and deployment complexities, according to Le.

“I think there’s real need to kind of unify, simplify and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies, and that’s something that we tried to do with this new project, Arlon,” he said.

Arlon doesn’t set out to reinvent the wheel. One of its primary objectives is simplifying computing and infrastructure management. As a result, it enables the configurations of numerous users, applications, locations and clusters to be standardized.

“With Arlon, you can express everything together. You can say, ‘I want a cluster with a health-monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller, and I want these applications and these security policies,’” Le said. “You can describe all of that using something we call a profile, and then you can stamp out your applications and clusters and manage them.”

While the success of containerization and Kubernetes has triggered concepts such as infrastructure as code, technological innovations, including declarative application programming interfaces, have built upon this concept, helping to more seamlessly realize the desired outcomes, according to Le.

“Everybody, or most people, know about infrastructure as code, but with Kubernetes, I think the project has evolved the concept even further. And, these days, it’s infrastructure as configuration,” Le noted. “With Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state, declare actively using things called manifest resources, and then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specified.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Bich Le:

2) Want an orchestrated, integrated management model? Supercloud is a perfect fit.

By acting as a single platform where enterprises can propel innovations irrespective of which cloud they are housed in, the supercloud concept seeks to be game-changer that will offer more decentralization.

“Supercloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically,” Gorti said. “Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it’s at the edge, it’s at a store, at the branch — you are looking at this as one unit.”

Based on supercloud’s programmable infrastructure, integration becomes inevitable. It seeks to take digital transformations a notch higher based on the seamless flow triggered, Gorti added.

“There are many options for you to run infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform, and that’s where we come in,” he said. “Whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud-native.”

Cloud-native at scale necessitates uniformity of tools and enhanced expertise. As a result, it doesn’t adhere to the lift-and-shift cloud approach because retooling or refactoring is needed, according to Gorti.

“You have to rewrite and redevelop your application and business logic using modern tools; hopefully, more open source, and I think that’s what cloud-native is,” he added.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Bhaskar Gorti:

3) Open source is at the heart of cloud-native at scale.

Since open source drives creativity and prompts technology agility, it is accelerating the cloud-native at scale concept. For instance, it enables the deployment of applications and configurations on top of Kubernetes clusters. As a result, open source offers developers a hands-on experience, making growth inevitable, according to Maskasky.

“One of the things that’s absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open-source technologies and then we make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model,” she stated.

Since Arlon is an open-source tool that uses Argo CD, it makes distributed infrastructure management more seamless. This accelerates the cloud-native notion, Maskasky explained.

“Arlon is an open-source project, a Kubernetes-native tool for complete, end-to-end management of not just your clusters, but all of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications,” she said.

Supercloud makes scalability a reality through a range of tools. This has been prompted by heightened cloud deployments.

“If you think about a supercloud environment, you need to complement that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale,” Maskasky added.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Maskasky:

And here’s the complete “Cloud Native at Scale” event video:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Cloud Native at Scale” event. Neither Platform9 Systems, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE