Today Spectro Cloud, an enterprise cloud-native infrastructure company, emerged from stealth and unveiled its first product: Spectro Cloud. Spectro Cloud provides scalable, policy-based management of Kubernetes for enterprises that need a high degree of control over their infrastructure, whether it is in public cloud, private cloud, bare metal or in any combination. The product has been in private beta since January and will be generally available next quarter. 

"Enterprises are struggling to realize the promise of Kubernetes due to its operational complexity. While the managed Kubernetes services solve this problem for those that want/need a completely pre-packaged approach, for the majority, they can become too restrictive for the varied needs that enterprises have. Spectro Cloud has created a flexible solution that provides the scalable automation and ease-of-use of the managed services, but enables enterprises to retain greater control," said Roy Illsley, Distinguished Analyst, Enterprise IT, Omdia.

Spectro Cloud lets enterprises customize a Kubernetes infrastructure stack for specific business needs by using a declarative model to define cluster profiles. Spectro Cloud uses these cluster profiles to automate deployment and maintenance of clusters across the enterprise. Canary deployments, patterns for rolling out releases to a subset of users or servers, ensure Kubernetes upgrades don't break dependencies on other ecosystem components while keeping everything consistent with enterprise-wide standards.

Sébastien Morissette, P.Eng., IT Architect Specialist - Infrastructure, Security and IT Services at Intact Financial Corporation, Canada's largest provider of property and casualty insurance, said: "Our business units end up choosing different Kubernetes providers as they all have different niches and varying maturity levels in different fields like AI, machine learning, public cloud vs on premises offerings, etc. Operationally, this becomes a nightmare because IT needs multiple support structures to address the different infrastructure stacks." 

Morissette continued: "A platform like Spectro Cloud addresses both the day 1 and day 2 operations of our Kubernetes ecosystem by normalizing the way IT deploys, operates and manages Kubernetes clusters over a broad spectrum of endpoints, both on premises and in the cloud. The control IT gets from Spectro Cloud's cluster profiles means they can customize offerings to each business unit while maintaining responsibility for overall operations."

"We've seen enterprises struggle with managed Kubernetes options, and we've also seen them waste time and money trying to do everything in-house. With Spectro Cloud, we're giving enterprises a way to run Kubernetes at scale without having to convert their entire way of working to whatever one large vendor thinks is correct. They've been burned by that approach before," said Tenry Fu, co-founder and CEO of Spectro Cloud. Fu most recently led the architecture for the Cisco CloudCenter Suite and Cisco Container Platform after his previous company, CliQr, was acquired by Cisco. CliQr's technology enabled applications to run more efficiently across public and private clouds.

Instead of converting their entire business to a single way of working, enterprises can experiment with new approaches at the pace that makes sense for them. Developers can work at the speed they need, while security and audit controls are embedded into the process, regardless of where clusters are deployed. Enterprises can make use of public cloud, private cloud, whatever suits their needs at the time, and change their mind as circumstances require. 

With Spectro Cloud, the promise of Kubernetes can finally be realized.

Today Spectro Cloud also announced $7.5 million in seed funding led by Sierra Ventures with participation from Boldstart Ventures. 

"The market for Kubernetes has crossed the chasm. What we've heard from our CXO Advisory Board of Global 1000 IT executives is that enterprises are still struggling with the operational complexity that comes with Kubernetes. Spectro Cloud's team has a deep understanding of the needs of enterprises and has found a unique way to make Kubernetes easy to use for its rapidly growing customer base," said Mark Fernandes, managing director at Sierra Ventures.

"From our dozens of conversations with Fortune 500s, it was clear that deploying Kubernetes was a top priority but there was still no solution that met their needs. Spectro Cloud is the first company that not only gives customers fine grained control, flexibility and multi-cloud capabilities for their Kubernetes stack but also the ease of use and scalability of a managed SaaS platform. The team's deep background in cloud infrastructure (founded CliQr - sold to Cisco) and their design first ethos has been well received by large enterprises, and we're thrilled to be partnered with Spectro Cloud as they redefine the infrastructure ecosystem," said Ed Sim, founder and managing partner at Boldstart Ventures.