Kazuhm Simplifies Kubernetes Management
Kazuhm has launched a Kubernetes-as-a-service (KaaS) offering that is designed from the ground up to be deployed on-premises or in the cloud using a common management interface.
Company CEO Tim O’Neal says the Kazuhm KaaS is designed to allow organizations to spend more time developing containerized applications versus managing the underlying Kubernetes clusters those applications run on.
Rather than being tied into a specific platform, the Kazuhm KaaS presents a consistent management interface regardless of where organizations decide to deploy Kubernetes. That approach not only eliminates the need to master different interfaces for different platforms, but it also makes it possible for Kazuhm to reclaim unused compute resources on behalf of the end customer more efficiently, says O’Neal.
At a time when most organizations have limited Kubernetes management expertise, the Kazuhm KaaS enables organizations to embrace a modern IT platform without having to necessary master every aspect of it, O’Neal says. Kazuhm provides a management interface with a more accessible layer of abstraction above a Kubernetes platform that was designed for engineers by other engineers. In fact, O’Neal says the Kazuhm interface is designed to be simple enough to allow, for example, data scientists to spin up clusters in less than 15 minutes. That capability means IT organizations can deploy and manage Kubernetes without having to give up complete control to an external managed IT services provider.
To help organizations get started with Kubernetes, the Kazuhm KaaS offering is available at no cost for up to 10 on-premises nodes. O’Neal says the time has come to support Kubernetes because the number of applications that can be deployed on it has reached critical mass.
Less clear is to what degree Kubernetes’ complexity is holding back the adoption of the platform. Most enterprise IT organizations have deployed at least one Kubernetes cluster by now; however, the number of applications running on Kubernetes clusters in production environments as a percentage of the whole remains slight. As Kubernetes becomes more accessible to the average IT administrator, the number of applications running on Kubernetes in a production environment should increase significantly.
Achieving that goal is critical because, despite the complexity of Kubernetes, it has become the platform more organizations will rely on to advance their hybrid cloud computing strategies. Unlike many other providers of Kubernetes platforms, Kazuhm has no vested interest in whether an organization decides to deploy Kubernetes on-premises or in a public cloud, notes O’Neal.
Kazuhm also is working on making it easier to deploy Kubernetes on Intel or Arm platforms, he says, in addition to providing tools that for easier deployment of, for example, an Apache Spark in-memory computing framework on top of Kubernetes.
It remains to be seen how many instances of Kubernetes clusters wind up running on-premises versus in the cloud. However, the more approachable Kubernetes becomes, the less internal IT inertia there will be to overcome.
