Gravitational, the company that delivers compliance solutions for cloud-native applications and infrastructure, today announced Gravity as an open-sourced Kubernetes packaging solution. Gravity reduces operational overhead by enabling fast, cloud-native application deployments into restricted, on-premise environments. Deployments include security and Kubernetes operational best practices out-of-the-box in order to meet enterprise compliance requirements.

Kubernetes is revolutionizing the way applications are built and distributed by removing unnecessary dependencies between applications and the infrastructure they run on. This allows software vendors to break away from cloud provider lock-in and distribute their cloud-native applications across clouds and on-premises. However, Kubernetes capabilities and granular configuration options can lead to massive operational complexity. This, coupled with the fact that it is a relatively new technology, has led to a lack of expertise and a need for "day 2" operational support for things like securing access, monitoring/logging and upgrading/patching. Gravity  mitigates this need by configuring upstream Kubernetes to incorporate operational best practices, hard earned from years of running Kubernetes in production at some of the largest financial institutions and government entities in the world.

Gravity allows users to take a snapshot of their Kubernetes cluster (including all applications and dependencies) and package it all into a single file that can be easily installed into any restricted environment, such as AWS GovCloud or air-gapped server rooms. Gravity also includes the popular, open source privileged access management solution, Teleport, which incorporates security best practices for accessing and logging activity throughout the cluster to satisfy enterprise compliance requirements.

"We have seen a lot of companies creating in-house, cobbled-together solutions to solve the very complex issue of running many Kubernetes clusters across different environments. It's incredibly time consuming and often insecure," said Ev Kontsevoy, CEO and cofounder at Gravitational. "We created Gravity to give users the freedom to focus on building their product instead of constantly navigating deployment and management headaches associated with running an application across multiple clouds or on premises."

Gravity creates consistency across deployments and allows teams to remotely manage many instances of a cluster, even if located behind a firewall. The primary use case for Gravity to date is software and SaaS vendors that need to deploy complex software into private data centers or third-party cloud accounts owned by their enterprise customers. The requirement to run software "on-prem" is common among larger customers due to security or compliance reasons.

"Gravity reduces the operations and the support burden normally associated with on-premises software," said Helgi Þorbjörnsson, Principal Architect at Mulesoft. "It also decreases the time it takes to adopt open source technology while enabling consistent application environments across deployments."