Managed cloud provider Rackspace today announced the launch of its Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering, rolling it out across all geographies this month for its private cloud clients, with a public cloud service coming later in the year.
The Texas-based hybrid cloud specialist said unlike most other providers it will fully operate and manage the Kubernetes deployment, including the infrastructure – claiming users can save up to 50 percent versus deploying the open source system themselves.
A Rackspace spokesman told Computer Business Review: “Besides the costs associated with employing Kubernetes engineers, as well as the time taken to locate individuals with relevant experience, there are also considerable costs incurred from training staff in new skills, maintaining servers and ensuring full support 24x7x365.”
He added: “Our service ensures that a customer always has access to an entire team of specialists, at any time of day, all year round. Our customers also avoid costs associated with hiring and training staff. Finally, customers also have access to servers and storage wherever they’re needed – whether it’s a data centre which belongs to them, Rackspace or co-location, as well as in leading public clouds.”
Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications. In essence, that means it is a way of running online software across a vast array of machines as efficiently as possible. It is the increasingly dominant player in cloud container orchestration, used by everyone from the Home Office to Bloomberg; Monzo to Walmart.
Lee James, CTO, EMEA, Rackspace, said in a release: “With Kubernetes-as-a-Service, we are providing the industry’s simplest consumption model by delivering it fully configured, tested and validated at enterprise scale with the managed cluster services customers need to effectively run their applications.”
Content from our partners
The company said the key benefits of the new offering include support for “Day 2” operations, including updates, upgrades, patching and security hardening and the ability to deploy Kubernetes clusters across private and public clouds using a single platform.
According to 451 Research, the application container software market will grow 40 percent over the next few years to nearly $3 billion in 2020.
(Containers comprise an entire runtime environment: an application, plus all its dependencies, libraries and other binaries, and configuration files needed to run it, bundled into one package. By containarising application platforms and their dependencies, different network topologies are abstracted away.)
Tech giants have been releasing a growing tide of Kubernetes solutions. Google Cloud wheeled out two new features earlier this month: an open source sandbox with secure isolation for containers and the ability to intercept application system calls, and the beta release of Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring; an out-of-the-box monitoring system.
Cisco this month also announced Kubernetes support for AppDynamics and Cisco CloudCenter. The same day, CoreOS, the Linux distribution and container management startup announced its Operator Framework, an open source toolkit for managing Kube clusters. Amazon Web Services meanwhile announced that its Fargate container service will support Virtual Kubelet; an open source project that makes it easier to run serverless containers such as ACI using Kubernetes
