Platform9 CEO Sirish Raghuram On The Road From OpenStack To Kubernetes

Will Kubernetes Repeat OpenStack's Mistakes?

The Kubernetes market is as hot as any in the IT industry as the container orchestration technology first developed at Google has emerged as something close to a standard layer of cloud infrastructure.

The hyper-scale cloud giants and other industry heavyweights are rushing to market hybrid platforms built upon the open source technology—Google is making a big bet on Anthos, VMware is preparing to challenge with Tanzu, and Red Hat, now owned by IBM, has done well with OpenShift.

At the same time, smaller players like Docker, Rancher, D2iQ, Kublr, Mirantis, SUSE, and others are all jostling for market share for their independent Kubernetes platforms.

As is Platform9, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup that's looking to deliver the core Kubernetes technology as a managed service.

It's all reminiscent of the days of yore, when OpenStack, another game-changing open source platform, was all the rage.

Platform9, and its SaaS approach to easing cloud infrastructure deployment, was born in that OpenStack market, but has since shifted focus to Kubernetes.

Sirish Raghuram, Platform9's CEO and co-founder, talked to CRN about the lessons learned from OpenStack, and how they can be applied to the benefit of Kubernetes.