Spectro Cloud announced it has released version 2.0 of its Palette offering. The industry-first platform delivers functionality that supports the full Kubernetes lifecycle across multiple deployment locations and offers full-stack Kubernetes management. Palette allows enterprises to unify management of the Kubernetes infrastructure, as well as curated add-on application services. This is critical to enable diverse development use cases.

The latest release of Palette enables IT teams and the development teams they support to establish a new benchmark for successful Kubernetes adoption. They can easily deploy new single-cluster and multi-cluster environments in data centers, cloud and edge locations, and even import existing ones to manage deployments using the same control plane.

Announced during CNCF's KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2021, the key new features of Palette 2.0, exemplary of Spectro Cloud's commitment for a full-stack management, are:

• A complete approach to bare metal and edge environments: Bare metal support comes via Palette's integration with Canonical's Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) interface, based on Spectro Cloud's recent open source contribution. Now with edge as well as bare metal support, organizations benefit from having a unified lifecycle management experience and consistent operations. This spans across the bare metal server operating system, to the Kubernetes infrastructure and add-on application services.

• Enhanced cost visibility, control and optimization: Palette can enable teams to better understand the utilization and cost of their Kubernetes deployments and projects, including granular namespace, cluster insights and right-sizing capabilities.

• A new "workspaces" feature: This brings enhanced governance and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) useful in both large single-cluster and diverse multi-cluster environments. This addresses the need for IT organizations to better support multiple application development departments and user-specific deployments with better production and enterprise-grade guardrails.

• Extended insights into clusters' health: IT teams can benefit from more granular and faster resource status assessment and alerting, building on top of Palette's existing continuous compliance checks and auto-healing capabilities

"The ongoing growth of Kubernetes adoption has created an industry need for innovation around how Kubernetes is being used," says Tenry Fu, CEO and co-founder at Spectro Cloud. "Customers are telling us that there is a gap in terms of ease of use and sophistication when it comes to Kubernetes management, as they prepare to move more container-based applications to production. With this new version, we have created a cohesive set of all the different capabilities that an enterprise needs to confidently scale their efforts. This intuitive platform comes with more deployment options to include edge and bare metal support, and additional features that provide enhanced cost optimization and governance controls."

"Finally, there is no need to choose or balance between usability and flexibility," continued Fu. "Our next-gen platform uniquely extends and incorporates the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Cluster API for best-in-class declarative Kubernetes management. This new Palette version further contributes towards our goal to make Kubernetes more accessible to all organizations."

Enterprise teams can experience many benefits with Palette 2.0, including more balanced workflows between teams, complete optionality and choice, and reduced cost and risk.

For development teams:

• Palette enables development teams to focus on delivering value, knowing that they are operating within a secure and future-proof environment.
• Development teams can reach their desired speed and outcomes by using Kubernetes exactly the way they want to, by easily consuming curated, diverse services to support their application innovation efforts.
• Teams have complete flexibility to customize and use any Kubernetes add-on application services, as well as being able to reuse them across multiple projects.

For IT operations (IT Ops) teams:

• IT Ops teams can benefit from Palette's built-in full-stack orchestration and declarative management that unifies and simplifies the end-to-end lifecycle operations across the complete stack, including both infrastructure and add-on application services for both new and existing Kubernetes environments, irrespective of location, version or distribution.
• In addition, Palette enables IT teams to accelerate and match the pace of the business, by easily adapting to support multiple diverse application efforts across different teams and departments, with a single management framework.
• The platform's enterprise-grade hardened security and governance features deliver peace of mind for operationalizing Kubernetes in production, while the visibility and control can help reduce risk, cost, and optimize critical business variables including spend and performance.

"It's like Spectro Cloud has been reading my mind," said Paul Nashawaty, senior analyst at ESG. "The challenges they are addressing with Palette align exactly with the most pressing issues I'm hearing when I talk to clients and are aligned to our recent research regarding how to move to the next level of Kubernetes maturity and towards production environments. This tells me that Spectro Cloud understands the now, as well as the future and potential of Kubernetes, and in line with our research."

"One example of a more macro-level challenge Spectro Cloud is solving for, is with the growing skills gap. This challenge ranked very high in our most recent container studies. There isn't a large enough talent pool of qualified applicants who are experienced in managing Kubernetes to meet the growing need for management," continued Nashawaty. "This comes as Kubernetes is maturing and expanding to more technologies, more locations, more capabilities and becoming of increasing importance for organizations. Spectro Cloud removes this recruiting and training obstacle for CIOs and IT leaders, making it easy for teams to access and manage."

Palette is currently available as both a software-as-a-service (SaaS) and a self-hosted software offering for on-premises use with additional options for air-gapped requirements. Spectro Cloud will host a two-part webinar with the first part on Wednesday, Nov. 10, discussing the modern requirements for enterprise Kubernetes management and the second part with the date to be announced for providing a deeper dive into the Palette platform. Check the Spectro Cloud website for further details.

Find out more about new features available with this product announcement in the following blog post by Vice President of Engineering and Spectro Cloud Co-founder Gautam Joshi.

To learn more about Palette, visit: www.spectrocloud.com/product.