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.