Komodor Extends Management Reach Across Kubernetes Stack
Komodor today at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024 conference revealed it has extended the reach of its Kubernetes management platform to add support for multiple frameworks that IT teams typically require to manage and deploy cloud-native applications.
Company CTO Itiel Shwartz said the goal is to enable a central IT team to visualize, operate, detect, investigate, remediate and optimize all the components in Kubernetes clusters, including add-ons such as the Istio service mesh.
Komodor provides a platform through which, for example, a platform engineering team is given access to a console that enables them to manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters. That capability is now being extended across the Kubernetes ecosystem to reduce the current level of complexity IT teams encounter when deploying and managing Istio or other add-ons such as Prometheus monitoring software, said Shwartz.
In effect, Komodor is now capable of managing the full stack of software IT teams need to deploy across multiple Kubernetes clusters, he added.
Komodor earlier this year added a generative artificial intelligence (AI) agent, dubbed Klaudia, to its platform that it has trained to identify the root cause of multiple issues. Additional agents might be added to provide similar capabilities for the add-ons or Komodor will be integrated with AI agents that might be developed for specific add-ons.
Kubernetes is, of course, simultaneously one of the most powerful and one of the most complex platforms to find mainstream adoption in the enterprise. IT organizations appreciate the ability to dynamically scale resources up and down, but many IT professionals are also intimated by the number of settings that need to be configured. It’s exceedingly easy to misconfigure a Kubernetes cluster, which has become an increasing source of concern for cybersecurity teams, simply because of the sheer number of YAML files involved.
Adding to that complexity are add-ons that in many cases are just as or more complex to manage than Kubernetes itself. Management platforms such as Komodor provide a layer of abstraction that makes Kubernetes more accessible. That’s critical because there is not enough DevOps expertise available to manage complex Kubernetes environments. Platforms such as Komodor make it possible to include IT administrators within a larger platform engineering team that includes DevOps specialists, noted Shwartz.
Despite existing management challenges, organizations continue to invest in building and deploying cloud-native applications. A TechStrong research survey finds roughly 60% of DevOps professionals surveyed work for organizations making significant investments in container and orchestration technologies over the next two years.
Overall, well over half of respondents work for organizations that have already deployed cloud-native applications in a production environment, with another 22% now evaluating whether to follow suit, the survey finds.
Not every container application finds its way onto a Kubernetes cluster but more soon will once it becomes possible to rely on AI frameworks and agents to manage the IT infrastructure. The challenge now is determining to what degree to rely on multiple smaller Kubernetes clusters versus a handful of larger ones capable of supporting multiple applications. Regardless of approach, the less intimating Kubernetes environments become, the more likely it will be that the pace of cloud-native application development will accelerate.
