KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2021. Will you be in attendance? If so, VMblog invites you to swing by and check out the Rafay Systems booth in the sponsor showcase.
Read this exclusive KubeCon pre-show interview between VMblog and Haseeb Budhani, CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems. The company offers the industry’s first Kubernetes Operations Platform to help enterprises maximize the value of containerized applications that deliver today’s business innovation. With Rafay, platform teams can operate modern application infrastructure at scale across public clouds, data centers, and the Edge. Deploying apps across multiple environments is streamlined, and enterprise-grade control and governance to application deployment workflows are offered through a single, unified platform.
VMblog: How can people find you at the show this year’s KubeCon event? Can you give VMblog readers a sneak peek as to what you will be showing off at your booth? What should attendees expect to see and hear at your booth?
Haseeb Budhani: Attendees can find Rafay Systems at booth SU9. We will be showcasing our Kubernetes Operations platform which is specifically designed to help enterprises and service providers manage the lifecycle of their Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications. With Rafay, software delivery teams take advantage of the following platform services — across both clusters and applications.
VMblog: Attendees always enjoy a good trade show tchotchke. Are you giving away any prizes at your booth or participating in any prize giveaways?
Budhani: Of course! We’ve created a KubeOps Challenge in which all attendees can participate. It involves signing up for a free trial of the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform and taking a screenshot of a few clusters that can be provisioned using Rafay in conjunction with Docker Desktop. If attendees are able to successfully complete the challenge they will receive a $100 Amazon gift card.
VMblog: What do you attribute to the success and growth of this industry and the KubeCon event itself?
Budhani: Application modernization is a tectonic shift that has been on the move for years now. But the journey to adopt microservices, containers and manage them all with Kubernetes can be complicated and difficult. KubeCon has grown in leaps and bounds because of the need of the market to learn all the best techniques and tools to make this journey successful.
VMblog: What are you most interested in hearing about at this year’s KubeCon event?
Budhani: How enterprises are scaling modern infrastructure and operationalizing modern application deployments to gain more efficiencies and drive business value.
VMblog: What are some of the reasons why you believe a KubeCon attendee should add you to their MUST SEE list?
Budhani: Any organization looking to help platform and SRE teams work smarter and more efficiently should check out Rafay. Rafay addresses the pressing need to extend beyond traditional Kubernetes management into a Kubernetes Operations mindset. This holistic approach unifies the lifecycle management of both Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications, and delivers a broad set of automation, security, visibility and governance capabilities needed by enterprise platform and operations teams. Instead of reinventing the same Kubernetes Operations wheel at significant cost in terms of time and resources, enterprises can leverage Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform to streamline and accelerate enterprise-wide application modernization initiatives.
VMblog: How does your company or product fit within the container, cloud, Kubernetes ecosystem?
Budhani: As companies modernize their apps, their infrastructure is also growing more complex — spanning from the data center to clouds and even at the edge. Rafay helps enterprises manage the complex and onerous job of Kubernetes operations across all of that new, complex infrastructure so they can modernize faster, and do so more easily and at less total cost.
VMblog: Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company’s technology offerings? Explain to readers who you are, what you do, what problems you solve, etc.
Budhani: The Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform is a SaaS offering that helps companies add the key capabilities of automation, security, visibility and governance on top of any Kubernetes distribution across any infrastructure. With the Platform, developers, SREs and DevOps teams can triage infrastructure and application issues faster than ever before, significantly reducing reading mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR). Developers, DevOps, operations and security teams can work together to deploy modern applications as much as 4x faster, reduce downtimes by 60% and eliminate security and compliance risk.
VMblog: And while talking about your products, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique? What are your differentiators?
Budhani: Rafay is the only company that delivers a single, unified platform that helps companies manage the full lifecycle of BOTH the Kubernetes clusters and the applications running on top of them. The Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform augments the enterprise platform team through the broad set of services for Platform and SRE teams:
- Multi-cluster management
- GitOps
- Zero-trust access
- Kubernetes policy management
- Backup & restore
- Visibility & monitoring
VMblog: If an attendee likes what they see and hear at your booth, what message about your product can you send them back with to sell their boss on your technology?
Budhani: Rafay has a turnkey way to remove the operational barriers that are slowing down our Kubernetes project and application modernization initiatives.
VMblog: There will be plenty of interesting topics covered during the KubeCon keynotes and breakout sessions. But can you take this opportunity to share your own thoughts about any big changes or directions you see for this industry? What trends do you see?
Budhani: We expect to hear a lot about challenges, best practices and opportunities experienced within modern infrastructures such as hybrid, multi-cloud and at the edge. There is massive growth in the number of tools and services organizations can use to help manage Day 1 , but that’s the easy part. We believe the opportunity is in unifying these tools and services in a way that helps teams to carry out Day 2 operations — such as automation, security, visibility and governance — easily, resulting in faster deployments of new apps to production, reduced app downtimes, and elimination of security & compliance risk associated with their infrastructure.
VMblog: What would you say to prospective attendees who are thinking about attending KubeCon but aren’t sure if it’s worth it or not?
Budhani: It’s totally worth it! The sheer amount of experience and knowledge that is shared is invaluable, no matter where you are in your application modernization or Kubernetes journey!
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