Rafay Systems made available its software-as-a-service (SaaS) for Kubernetes lifecycle management and closed an $8 million Series A funding round with backing from NTT Docomo Ventures. Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo is also a customer, said co-founder and CEO Haseeb Budhani in an interview with SDxCentral.

Ridge Ventures led the Series A, and Costanoa Ventures and Moment Ventures also participated in the round. Both of these firms previously participated in the company’s $4.1 million seed round.

Budhani and VP of Engineering Hemanth Kavurulu co-founded Rafay in late 2017. Previously they worked together to start Soha Systems, which was acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2016.

The two started writing Rafay code in January 2018. A year and a half later, “we have enough mileage on the platform now that we feel it’s ready for true prime time,” Budhani said. “We have enough customers on it and we’re at a point where it solves the right problems.”

The platform has upwards of 50 users and “10-ish” paying customers, he added. In addition to NTT, network security company SonicWall is a customer.

Rafay’s platform provides lifecycle management for containerized applications. It builds on top of native Kubernetes and managed Kubernetes services with capabilities including application abstraction and cluster blueprinting. It also allows multi-cluster federation so customers can deploy and operate containerized applications across any number of Kubernetes clusters spread across regions and hybrid environments such as Amazon’s EKS and Pivotal’s PKS.

Additionally, enterprise customers can integrate other technologies such as secrets management, runtime configuration updates, and log and metrics aggregation into the platform with one click.

“Everybody’s got a Kubernetes offering. That’s not a differentiator anymore,” Budhani said. “But the [Kubernetes] lifecycle management piece? Differentiated.”

Every company is trying to solve this problem, and because of this many are building internal platforms for Kubernetes orchestration. But those require additional software packages and tools that also work with Kubernetes, which creates "a very complicated stack," Budhani said. “Rafay seems to be one of the first iterations of such a lifecycle management framework that you can consume as a SaaS offering. Fundamentally the two things Rafay does incredibly well is distribution and abstraction. It doesn’t matter how many clusters you are running or where they are running. All the things you do to run your applications, you can now do it in one location.”

While it may be one of the first, other much larger vendors are hot on its heels, with VMware making its new Kubernetes portfolio the centerpiece of its recent VMworld event. VMware can’t provide these lifecycle management capabilities yet, but CEO Pat Gelsinger has repeatedly vowed to make VMware “the enterprise dial tone for Kubernetes.”

Budhani said he’s not worried. “Today what VMware is offering is a number of forward-looking statements,” he said, adding that VMworld last month — with its strong Kubernetes focus — was a major boost for Rafay.

“There was nothing better that has happened to this company in the last 21 months, because [VMware] put Kubernetes on the map,” he said. “They are telling every large enterprise you need to start thinking about Kubernetes, but what have they offered to the market so far?”