The rise of Kubernetes since Google open-sourced the project back in 2014 says a lot about the broader industry push toward containerized applications. In a survey released last year, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found that 92% of organizations now use containers in production environments, representing a 300% increase since 2016. Moreover, 91% of organizations that do run containers, use Kubernetes for orchestration.
Containers, essentially, are software packages that “contain” all the required components for companies to run their applications in public clouds or private datacenters, solving the problem of getting software to play nicely when shifted between environments. Kubernetes, meanwhile, is used by some of the world’s biggest businesses to automate the manual processes involved in managing these containerized applications, and is now one of the world’s top three open source projects — according to some estimations, at least.
Kubernetes is king
As with just about every popular open source project, a flourishing ecosystem of platforms and products have emerged on top of Kubernetes, from big tech companies such as Amazon, to a flurry of fledgling startups. One of these is Kubermatic, a five-year-old German company that helps major enterprises such as Allianz, Lufthansa, and Siemens automate their Kubernetes management and deployment across clouds, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
Kubermatic, which counts itself among the top corporate contributors to the Kubernetes project, rebranded from Loodse last June, at the same as it open-sourced its core Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP) under an Apache 2.0 Licence. Today, the Hamburg-based company announced it has raised $6 million in a seed round of funding led by Nauta Capital, with plans to put its fresh cash injection toward increasing adoption of its open source product and grow its enterprise customer base internationally.
As more and more businesses strive to modernize their IT infrastructure, this inevitably means transitioning applications to microservices and the cloud, while it may also mean adopting a multi- or hybrid-cloud approach. And so modern software has to be both malleable and scalable, while also being robust and reliable (i.e., bug-free) — this creates a great deal of complexity for developers and IT teams.
“What we can observe with enterprises across all industries is that the pressure on IT has never been greater,” Kubermatic CEO and cofounder Sebastian Scheele told VentureBeat. “IT managers face the challenge of modernizing their complete IT landscape to make use of data and automation to build better products — and ultimately stay competitive in a digitizing world.”
So how, exactly, does Kubermatic address this? According to Scheele, Kubermatic solves the core challenges by automating complex Kubernetes installations, while offering flexibility over what tools and infrastructure IT teams can use. What this means is that developers themselves, rather than a handful of senior figures further up the IT chain, can access a self-service Kubernetes platform to deploy their clusters across any infrastructure — and centrally manage all their workloads from a single dashboard.
