Today, Heptio,
in collaboration with Actapio, a subsidiary of Yahoo Japan Corporation,
announces Gimbal, an open source initiative to unify and scale the flow
of network traffic into hybrid environments consisting of multiple
Kubernetes clusters and traditional infrastructure technologies
including OpenStack.
Gimbal removes obstacles for companies
looking to adopt Kubernetes in their environments by routing high volume
traffic into both Kubernetes clusters and existing solutions like
OpenStack that often live side by side in the enterprise infrastructure.
This cloud native solution is tailored for the highly dynamic nature of
managing Kubernetes workloads, which expensive, existing solutions are
not designed to do. By using Gimbal, companies can leverage the agility
of cloud native systems to modernize legacy infrastructure, giving them faster time-to-market at reduced cost.
The advantages of Gimbal include:
- Cost effectiveness.
Gimbal is a software solution that runs on commodity hardware and
serves the same function as much more expensive purpose built hardware
solutions. This creates a significantly more affordable solution for
real world environments.
- Simplicity and flexibility. Gimbal
scales for multi-team Kubernetes clusters of all sizes with reduced
complexity and increased reliability. Being API driven, it integrates
easily with legacy and cloud native systems.
- Cloud Native first; legacy friendly. Existing
solutions were not designed to support dynamic, rapidly scaling cloud
native deployments. Gimbal was built from the ground up to seamlessly
integrate with Kubernetes and handle dynamic workloads. It also
integrates with existing systems to create a unified traffic tier that
can span new and old back-end systems.
- Multi-cloud ready. Gimbal
enables load balancing on any cloud on-premises, on cloud platforms
where Kubernetes is deployed, and as a network across multiple clouds.
It can serve as an alternative to cloud provided load balancers as a way
to ensure that workloads are fully decoupled from the infrastructure
they run on.
"We approached Heptio to help us modernize
our infrastructure with Kubernetes without ripping out legacy
investments in OpenStack and other back-end systems," said Norifumi
Matsuya, CEO and President at Actapio. "Application delivery at scale is
key to our business. We needed faster service discovery and canary
deployment capability that provides instant rollback and performance
measurement. Gimbal enables our developers to address these challenges,
which at the macro-level helps them increase their productivity and
optimize system performance."
"This collaboration demonstrates
the full potential of cloud native technologies and open source as a way
to not only manage applications, but address broader infrastructure
considerations," said Craig McLuckie, founder and CEO of Heptio.
"Kubernetes is a natural starting point, but integrating it fully into
the real world is still an evolving story. Systems like Gimbal help to
pragmatically bridge existing systems and new cloud native
infrastructure like Kubernetes. We have been thrilled to work with
Actapio to look more broadly at traffic management."
The Actapio implementation underscores Heptio's business momentum since emerging from stealth
in November of 2016. Backed by Accel Partners and Madrona Venture
Group, the company saw revenue grow 140 percent from Q4 2017 to Q1 2018 ‒
part of its year over year momentum of onboarding scores of new
customers. The company also quadrupled its employee headcount from Q1
2017.
Gimbal is currently in alpha and under active development.
Heptio and Actapio look forward to working with the open source
community to build a flexible system.
- Download here link
- Technical details of the project are available here