Rafay Systems, the platform provider for Kubernetes management and operations, is announcing the integration of a brand new capability designed for the company’s Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) which eases the management burden of large Kubernetes clusters throughout various environments—including data centers, popular public clouds such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, as well as at the edge. Functioning under the moniker Automated Fleet Operations, this capability eradicates the manual labor associated with the management of large Kubernetes clusters, bringing flexible, repeatable, and automated workflows to the technological table.
Managing and ensuring the operation of large, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments prompts a myriad of challenges, according to the vendor.
“The genesis of Automated Fleet Ops was essentially a result of the fact that there are a lot of enterprises standardizing on Kubernetes. For that application, they find themselves running a lot of clusters…[and] the tooling that exists in the market up to now is usually very manual, cumbersome, and painful,” explained Mohan Atreya, SVP of product and solutions at Rafay Systems.
Between the burden of labor, the subsequent need for custom tooling, and the fact that operational teams are often stretched too thin, Kubernetes clusters can pose greater inefficiency than they do productivity. Not only is it a threat to performance, but it can also introduce security, compliance, and reliability issues as well.
“That resulted in us thinking about what we can do to change this dramatically for these organizations,” Atreya continued.
Innovating on this area of ineffectuality, Rafay Systems developed Automated Fleet Operations to enable batch automation of thorough lists of actions that are then executed on a fleet of clusters. Actions can be triggered quickly, automatically, and more than once, running until completion with security and compliance in mind. These actions include:
- Upgrading clusters
- Updating applications
- Scaling nodes
- Managing software configuration patches and more
Users are empowered to engineer end-to-end automation and custom workflows that ensure the success of automated tasks, easing the operational burden inflicted upon platform and operations team resources. Customization is a highly desirable component of Automated Fleet Operations, as “it’s not like a black box. It can be tweaked and customized, as everyone's problems are a little different,” according to Atreya.
Compounded with its wealth of benefits applicable to Kubernetes clusters, “it doesn't matter to us where these clusters are in which infrastructure. They could be on-prem, upstream Kubernetes, or it could be Amazon EKS in AWS, for example. [All of] those typical management and operational processes that you have to do—this would support all of that,” explained Sean Wilcox, SVP of marketing at Rafay Systems.
Automated Fleet Operations also features integrations with existing tools, such as Terraform and GitOps, for both initiation of fleetwide operations and system synchronization with fleet configuration updates.
Additionally, this capability falls in line with Rafay Systems’ SaaS approach to Kubernetes and Kubernetes management.
“All of our customers that are currently on the platform are going to have access to this new capability, and any new customers would have access to this,” said Wilcox. “So, there's no extra charge or fee for this capability. We simply are adding it to the platform, and all of our customers will have the capability.”
Ultimately, the launch of this capability is entirely architected to enable the professionals dealing with the management of large Kubernetes cluster environments to get back to innovating and supporting other critical issues, which often prevent the fruition of positive business outcomes.
“This is a tool that can help these IT, developer, and operations folks to get back to innovating in the market versus [having to address] this plumbing that doesn't add a ton of value,” concluded Wilcox.
To learn more about Rafay Systems’ Automated Fleet Operations capability, please visit https://rafay.co/.