Red Kubes, a Dutch-based startup, open sourced a free community edition of its Otomi Container Platform in a bid to remedy the ongoing complexity surrounding Kubernetes configurations.

The scalability, agility, and speed-to-market advantages that Kubernetes offers have been handsome enough to capture a growing share of the enterprise market, but this very strength can become an Achilles heel for container deployments. In this sense, it’s far too easy – and common – to create thousands or even tens of thousands of containers across applications. Not only does this create an operational money pit, but management becomes a herculean feat to any container newbie. 

“Kubernetes needs a lot of applications and configuration for cross-cutting concerns such as networking, logging, telemetry, security, continuous deployment, etc.,” Maurice Faber, co-founder and CTO of Red Kubes, explained.  

Red Kubes aims to solve this complexity with its Otomi Container Platform, which bundles together open source Kubernetes add-ons into a users cluster, and provides a single dashboard to manage and monitor them. By open-sourcing the community edition of the platform, Red Kubes hopes to “collaborate with a small but growing number of partners that want to use Otomi to deliver value to their customers” and stop companies from “overspending and under delivering” by “reinventing yet another wheel,” Faber explained.

Red Kubes was founded by Sander Rodenhuis and Faber in 2019. They developed the platform to turn any Kubernetes cluster in any cloud into a container platform. Otomi bundles what Red Kubes considers to be “best of breed” tools into “a single deployable solution that pre-configures those apps with multi-tenancy awareness and sane defaults,” Faber said. Currently, this includes Prometheus tools for monitoring Kubernetes clusters, Istio service mesh, the Harbor container registry, and a few others.

For IT teams looking to automate the deployment of a complete Kubernetes environment, Otomi features DNS servers, ingress controllers, and certificate provisioning. On top of that it has a console for multi-tenant self service, allowing for microservice deployment and configuration, Faber added. Otomi’s open architecture can also be extended to include more applications to be exposed through feature flags whether running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or on premises. 

“We are in this wild west era of mining the Kubernetes space, to develop new layers of cloud native functionality onto,” Faber said. “We are one of the pioneers to craft such a foundation, abstracting away Kubernetes internals. This market sees many new players and exotic solutions landing.”

Everyone from cloud providers to Kubernetes startups are working on some sort of turn-key service to simplify Kubernetes management and configuration. According to Faber, big cloud players are slowly evolving from the bottom, offering managed Kubernetes services and building their own services around them to eat up point solutions while avoiding implementation specifics and trapping users in vendor lock-in. “They rather leave that to their marketplace and milk their infrastructure offerings as long as this wild west lets them,” he added. “We see no competition there, yet.” 

On the other hand is this strong belief in one-stop services with a “single pane of glass,” which Faber deemed “extremely hard to realize” as they struggle to keep up with the evolving needs of the industry in this day of distributed computing. Those that take this approach take on technical debt resulting from wiring up this “pane of glass” to open source or proprietary building blocks under the hood, according to Faber.  

Otomi sits somewhere in the middle “by offering a range of open source point solutions to work in tandem, glued together,” Faber said. He went on to call Red Kubes’ approach a “sustainable model that caters to developers by integrating tools and applications they know and love.” In other words, users that install Otomi to run on top of Kubernetes deployments on Azure or on AWS, for example, can manage them with one console with consistency.

The open source community has made its mark on the software development space through its one-for-all, all-for-one group think and pace of innovation that no single enterprise could ever hope to match. This has allowed open source-based platforms to spread quickly through the market and become the basis for much of the advancements across the software-defined ecosystem.

It may take time for open source technologies to fully pervade the enterprise but free-flowing and creative environments, such as that of the open source community, embolden businesses to push beyond perceived limitations. 

Just about everything in 2020 had a limitation, but if Microsoft stepping up efforts to shed its image as a purveyor of proprietary software by deeming open source technology the “accepted model” for collaboration between companies serves as any indication, open source projects could very well be an accelerant for innovation in 2021.