Rancher Labs is heading back to the bank today after announcing a $40 million Series D funding round led by Rancher customer and Australia’s largest telecommunications company, Telstra. The new round brings its total funding to date to $95 million.

As Kubernetes continues to steamroll the cloud market, the open source Kubernetes management platform company is planning to put this new round of funding toward innovation, geographic go-to-market expansion, and expanding the reach of Kubernetes with its eyes set on the edge.

Rancher Labs CEO Sheng Liang told SDxCentral that his company is “pretty well funded already,” and – in fact, “not in need of funding.” 

“Now that we have the funding, I don't think we're going to dramatically change what we’re focused on,” Liang explained. “We’re going to continue to execute our business plan, accelerating innovation, and making sure that Kubernetes is not just get accepted but becomes the common compute standard.”

According to Liang, the company is going to continue investing in international market expansion riding on the name recognition that Kubernetes technology is going to play in markets such as 5G, connected cars, smart manufacturing, and video surveillance. 

In particular, Liang emphasized the company’s focus on expanding the reach of Kubernetes into the 5G market around the use of containerized network functions (CNFs). Although still quite young, CNFs are beginning to establish a stable footing in the market for its advantages in performance, resource savings, and elasticity. 

“I'm very bullish about it and I know our customers are too,” Liang said of the push. “If you kind of look at the data center cloud side of the mobile operator, the rate of iteration happens a lot faster and the need for communication is also a lot higher. I think that's where Kubernetes tend to offer the advantage.” 

Kubernetes is nearing the point where it is being used in lieu of OpenStack, which operators have used as a basis for their virtualization efforts. 

“Kubernetes is not only going to be everywhere, but there's really not going to be a viable business just supplying Kubernetes because it's going to be table stakes. Cloud providers are going to be providing Kubernetes as a service for free,” Liang explained. “So who's gonna buy something like OpenShift and run it on Amazon when you can basically get EKS for 10 cents an hour?”

However, as telecommunications vendors journey down the Kubernetes route, one of the bigger challenges still facing the community as it reaches further out to the edge is managing its steep maturation ramp. Vendors like Cisco, Red Hat/IBM, and Dell/VMware have been aggressive in launching managed platforms designed to level that ramp.

To differentiate itself, Liang said Rancher Labs has focused on providing additional capabilities on top of Kubernetes to make it easier to deploy and manage. This refocused provisioning comes in the form of Ranchers k3s edge-specific Kubernetes distribution platform. The year-old offering is a consolidated version of Kubernetes, which is often referred to as “k8s.” Unique to k3s is its slimness, which is important as edge locations are more resource constrained compared to data center or network core locations. 

In other words, k3s gets comfortable in the uncomfortable. As result, interest and adoption has “gone through the roof” according to Liang, and generated new opportunities for Rancher to innovate “unique product offerings centered around heterogeneous Kubernetes management.” 

“We feel really good about the space, the market demand, and the ability to continue to innovate and keep our customers happy – and that’s just what we’re going to do one quarter at a time,” Liang said.