Pardon me if this is somewhere right under my nose, but what is it that Heptio will actually do to "Bring Containers to Enterprise"? Will they maintain a commercial Kubernetes spin, ala Tectonic? Are they going to be mostly about consulting? Will they sell any add-ons?
[disclosure: Craig -- CEO]
to name a few
1. support and services. this is a really important factor for most enterprises; they want to know they have expert staff on call who have a decent shot at getting a change they need upstreamed.
2. consolidation and operations at scale. turns out Kubernetes is being deployed as a 'devops tool' today and people create lots of teensy clusters. we built it to be super flexible and work either for smaller clusters, or work at scale (using namespaces, etc). there are advantages to running larger expert operated clusters (borg style) and we want to help enterprises get there with consolidation and operations tools.
3. integration tech. there are oceans of 'legacy' systems that basically run enterprise today and need to be integrated with.
4. help with for non-Google environments. despite the fact that there are tons of interested commercial parties in K8s, except for a few awesome community folks companies aren't putting a ton of resource into AWS, or OpenStack, etc and do unglamorous testing work, etc. Would love to help get the cloud provider model sustainable, and put effort into doing stuff like testing and better deployment tech.
Greg,
Is business model centered on delivery & facilitating heavy lifting necessary for large enterprise? Will this heavy lifting be delivered as "professional & support" service....batteries included like solutions for legacy system integrations. Primarily K8S focused high powered consultancy services??
Company centered & focussed on helping enterprise embrace open cloud, cloud native systems and help them realize value is fantastic. We are at a juncture where building a company on such tenets make sense....better chance of a building viable business model around it. Pain of vendor lock-in in enterprise software space will only grow strongly in coming years.
cmcluck: can you say more about the "advantages to running larger expert operated clusters"?