KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2021. Will you be in attendance? If so, VMblog invites you to learn about Red Kubes.
Read this exclusive pre-show interview between VMblog and Sander Rodenhuis, CEO of Red Kubes, developers of the Otomi Container Platform, a cloud-agnostic platform to run on top of Kubernetes that offers a desktop environment combined with built-in applications, and works out-of-the-box.
VMblog: As a KubeCon 2021 sponsor, how excited is your company to be back at an in-person trade show event?
Sander Rodenhuis: We were very excited, but unfortunately, we are not able to come. We were kind of hoping the US would lift the ban on prohibiting people from the EU to come to the US, just before KubeCon. Now the US is going to lift the ban, but only from the beginning of November. So just a couple of weeks after KubeCon. So our booth is going to be empty.
VMblog: I’m sorry to hear that. What about the virtual booth? If so, what do you plan on showcasing?
Rodenhuis: Because we will not be able to physically staff our booth, we will be staffing the virtual booth. We recently made our product (Otomi) completely open-source (see our GitHub project here). Attendees can come and visit our booth to ask us any kind of questions about Otomi. So if you would like to know how Otomi can help you speed up Kubernetes adoption and enable DevOps to succeed when using Kubernetes? Come and meet us!
VMblog: Have you sponsored KubeCon in the past? If so, what is it about this show that keeps you coming back as a sponsor?
Rodenhuis: Yes, we have sponsored before. But we must say that the virtual experience is not offering us the full ability to reach the audience we would like. That’s why we were really looking forward to physically attend. KubeCon however is the largest event in the world when it comes to cloud-native technologies and especially Kubernetes. So it’s the place to be when you are a vendor in this space.
VMblog: What are some of the reasons why you believe a KubeCon attendee should add you to their MUST SEE list?
Rodenhuis: Well because Otomi is the only open source project that is completely cloud-agnostic and offers a full enterprise-grade platform experience for Kubernetes.
Otomi is free, easy to install, comes with an intuitive desktop-like UI and ready-to-use pre-configured built-in applications to offer an out-of-the-box experience. Just like you would expect from your favorite Linux distribution. After installing Otomi on Kubernetes, you can log in and immediately start deploying and use all the built-in applications. Otomi is built on top of a whole bunch of popular open-source, projects like Istio, Knative, Prometheus, Harbor, Keycloak, and many others, but you don’t need to install and configure them one-by-one. Otomi provides a base configuration for all of these apps to support the most common DevOps use-cases out-of-the-box.
VMblog: How does your company or product fit within the container, cloud, Kubernetes ecosystem?
Rodenhuis: We see Kubernetes as the kernel of an operating system. People will say that Kubernetes is the Linux of the cloud. But in this analogy, there is still no real Kubernetes distribution compared to a Linux distribution. This is where we try to step in.
No, Otomi is not a full distribution in comparison to a Linux distribution. It does not come with an integrated kernel (Kubernetes), but it comes really close. Instead, Otomi can use any Kubernetes API as its kernel, making it even more flexible, but also completely cloud-agnostic.
The Linux distribution analogy for us is the best way to explain what Otomi is. Otomi is an operating system approach to Kubernetes. It uses Kubernetes as its kernel, uses Helm/Helmfile as its package manager, offers a desktop environment combined with built-in applications, can be installed with a single command, is free, and works out-of-the-box. This means that all built-in applications are pre-configured, integrated, and ready-to-use. But just as with any Linux distro, you can also install your own applications and use the Otomi CLI or Kubectl to dive under the hood.
VMblog: Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company’s technology offerings? Explain to readers who you are, what you do, what problems you solve, etc.
Rodenhuis: Red Kubes is a Dutch startup with the ambition to develop products that make Kubernetes easy or eventually disappear. Our flagship product is Otomi, a Kubernetes-based platform that is easy to install, offers a new user experience for Kubernetes, comes with built-in and integrated applications and works out-of-the-box. Just like you would expect from your favorite Linux distribution.
With Otomi organisations can lower the operational burdon, speed up their time to market and flatten the steep learning curve that comes with Kubernetes. Otomi sets the development team up for success. Allowing them to focus on their Application. Otomi was built on the toil removal philosophy of SRE.
VMblog: And while talking about your product, can you give readers a few examples of how your offering is unique? What are your differentiators?
Rodenhuis: If you look at products like OpenShift or Rancher, they say their product helps developers to become more productive when using using Kubernetes and they provide integrated applications. Everybody can say this, but we really help developers to become more proiductive and take ‘integration’ to a whole new level. Some examples:
- Teams are each given a project in Harbor, allowing team users to push and pull container images
- Istio virtual services are automatically generated for team services, tying a generic ingress architecture to service endpoints in a predictable way
- Two ingress gateways are automatically configured per team: one for SSO traffic and one for public exposure
- Nginx-ingress ingress resources are automatically generated for all for team services
- Teams automatically get their own Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Grafana instance, allowing them to view only their own resources
- Teams automatically get access to a space in Vault to manage theis secrets
Otomi also comes with developer self service features. This enables developers to configure ingress for a service with a single click, or deploy an application using Knative by only providing a repository name and tag. With Otomi, DevOps teams can have their application up and running within 5 minutes and have everything in place to take full ‘run’ responsibility.
VMblog: If an attendee likes what they see and hear at your booth, what message about your product can you send them back with to sell their boss on your technology?
Rodenhuis: Otomi can save months of work, eliminate technical debt and enables DevOps teams to move software into production faster and in a secure way. Otomi also helps with the adoption of Kubernetes by providing guardrails and best-practices. This enables teams to start using Kubernetes today and learn along the way and flatten the steep learning curve that comes with Kubernetes.
VMblog: Normally at the KubeCon event, sponsors are showcasing new products or new product updates and features for the first time. Do you have anything new that you’ve either recently announced or plan to discuss in more detail at the event? Can we get a sneak peek?
Rodenhuis: No sorry, no sneak previews. But we recently made Otomi completely open source. If you would like to get involved, come and meet us! Also check-out our GitHub repository for new releases.
VMblog: At what stage do you feel we are at with regard to containers? Is there anything still holding it back? Or keeping it from a wider distribution?
Rodenhuis: Containerization is the next step after virtualisation. It enables to run your software everywhere. But hosting containers without some kind of orchestration is not going you to ship your software faster. Thats why the adoption of Kubernetes has gone so fast. But maybe a little to fast. Most companies are already struggling with it. Kubernetes is time consuming and expensive to adopt, is complex to maintain and is not developer friendly. Don’t believe what some of the big vendors are saying. If this is not going to change soon, Kubernetes might not have a long live. This is our mission with Otomi: lower the operational burden and costs while speeding up the time to market.
VMblog: There will be plenty of interesting topics covered during the KubeCon keynotes and breakout sessions. But can you take this opportunity to share your own thoughts about any big changes or directions you see for this industry? What trends do you see?
Rodenhuis: I recently read an interesting quote from Craig McLuckie (Kubernetes co-founder and now VMware executive):
“If we do our job right, people will stop talking about Kubernetes in the next five years. Not because it goes away, but because it becomes a normalized and boring substrate supporting waves of new innovation above it.”
Let’s make Kubernetes boring! (just as Linus Torvalds, modest goal for Linux) and add new innovations like Otomi on top of it.
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