Since containers have become heavily embedded in the enterprise world, deployment difficulties and Kubernetes configuration have emerged. This begs the question: What is the right path to cloud-native?

Traditional paths to cloud-native have been public cloud Kubernetes and the do-it-yourself approach, which have been cumbersome based on roadblocks such as being time consuming and a walled garden. To tackle these pain points, Platform9 Systems Inc. takes the strength of each path and provides a container management and orchestration solution, according to Chris Jones (pictured), director of product management at Platform9.

“Platform operation teams that are adopting cloud-native in their environment, they’ve got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes,” Jones said. “What we’re doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location — be that an air gap environment like a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G.”

Jones recently spoke with John Furrier, industry analyst for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio, about Platform9’s cloud-native solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Keeping an eye on Kubernetes limitations

Even though virtualization caters for over-provisioning, Kubernetes does not, and this is one of the restrictions that should be watched by cloud-native organizations, according to Jones.

“When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes,” he said. “So instead of just being able to say, ‘Hey, I’m throwing over the fence, and now it’s just going to run on a VM. And that VMs got everything it needs.’ It’s now really running on much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors.”

By eliminating the headache of scrutinizing Kubernetes, Platform9 allows for a cloud-native environment that heightens scalability and resilience, according to Jones, who said that this enables businesses to focus on what’s high value.

“I think the goal is that promised land, increased resiliency, better scalability and overall reduced costs,” he stated. “If your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ‘I need Metrics Server to make something function; I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler,’ that’s not the right path.”

There is more than meets the eye in the cloud-native journey, according to Jones, who said that taking a container and dropping it into Kubernetes is not the way to go.

“I’m moving to containers; I’m removing that OS layer again. I’m getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I’m running Kubernetes,” he pointed out. “Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I’m running and how it’s running so it fits that infrastructure? There are things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is cloud-native.”

Spend control is top of mind for Platform9

Based on the current market turmoil, spend control has become vital in the enterprise world. Platform9 enables this through products like KubeVirt, which runs virtual machines on Kubernetes, according to Jones.

“The CIO is saying let’s modernize; let’s use the cloud,” he noted. “Now all of a sudden they’re recognizing, ‘We’ll wait. We’re spending a lot of money now. Our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those occurrences.’ So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds.”

Since developers are driving the standards, Platform9 puts significant emphasis on developer productivity, according to Jones. This entails tackling the complexities endured when dealing with containers.

“The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers,” he pointed out. “We don’t want people going back to what I’ve been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It’s, hey, I’ve been told to do something; I kicked off this container initiative; I need to run my software somewhere.  We want to keep those people productive.”

Here’s the complete CUBE conversation, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage:

(* Disclosure: Platform9 Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Platform9 nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE