Mirantis Unfurls Managed CI/CD Service for Kubernetes
Mirantis today launched DevOpsCare, powered by Lens, a managed continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) service based on its integrated development environment (IDE) running on Kubernetes clusters.
Anoop Kumar, director of professional services for Mirantis, says the goal is to make it simpler for developers to automate application development processes without requiring IT organizations to build and maintain a DevOps platform.
Mirantis also plans to build additional extensions using the open source Lens IDE it acquired last year to expand its managed services portfolio for Kubernetes in addition to encouraging customers to build their own extensions using a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that have been added to the Lens IDE, Kumar says.
Mirantis claims there are already 200,000 Kubernetes clusters being managed via the Lens IDE. Lens provides a higher level of abstraction for both building applications and managing the Kubernetes cluster they are deployed on. In total, Mirantis is reporting the Lens IDE has now been downloaded more than five million times.
The launch of DevOpsCare powered by Lens comes on the heels of the release of Mirantis Flow, a data center-as-a-service platform for running both monolithic and microservices-based applications on virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters. It is designed to make it simpler for IT teams to take advantage of a platform that can be deployed on multiple clouds or in an on-premises IT environment.
Kumar says Mirantis is attempting to make Kubernetes clusters more accessible to a wider range of developers through the managed services it provides. Many IT organizations today lack both the expertise to manage Kubernetes and the skills required to configure and maintain a DevOps platform, he notes. Mirantis, for example, will collect metrics on behalf of customers that can then be used to optimize their DevOps workflows, says Kumar.
CI/CD platforms, by definition, require IT organizations to completely change their software development life cycle. Such efforts require a massive amount of engineering effort, which helps explain why so many organizations that have embraced DevOps have done so unevenly. Few organizations have been able to implement a consistent set of DevOps best practices across the entire enterprise.
However, Mirantis is betting that, as organizations shift toward building microservices-based applications constructed using containers, more organizations will opt to rely on an external IT services provider to manage their IT infrastructure.
It’s not clear to what degree IT organizations are opting to rely on external service providers to manage Kubernetes environments on their behalf. In some cases, individual development teams are choosing that option while in others IT leaders have made a strategic decision to focus less on managing IT infrastructure in favor of focusing on application development.
Regardless of approach, the number of microservices-based applications being deployed in production environments continues to steadily increase. The issue that organizations are trying to come to terms with is that while Kubernetes is arguably the most powerful IT platform to find mainstream adoption in the enterprise, it is also the most complex. While the tools for managing Kubernetes environments continue to improve, the pace at which applications are built and deployed, in many cases, now exceeds the ability of internal IT teams to effectively handle on their own.
