Apprenda today announced that it now offers a commercial distribution of Kubernetes, the well-known tool for deploying and managing containerized applications. Along with the new product, Apprenda will also offer enterprise support subscriptions to companies running Kubernetes.
Additionally, Apprenda announced the acquisition of Kismatic, which provides production support for Docker and Kubernetes. According to the announcement, this acquisition will accelerate Apprenda’s vision of “powering the transition to cloud-native applications and enabling developers to build software quickly and reliably.”
“We’re clearly in the midst of a cloud revolution. Every company is becoming a software company, and many of their new software projects — whether they be cloud, IoT, or mobile — are cloud-native microservices,” said Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda.
This announcement follows Apprenda’s recent actions to ramp up its open source involvement, including joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and open sourcing several plugins for its cloud platform. Patrick Reilly, CEO and founder of Kismatic, is a governing board member of the CNCF and will lead Apprenda’s Kubernetes strategy as the company’s new CTO.
“With our Kismatic offering, we’ll be directly involved in and contributing to the [CNCF] project. In fact, we’ve already started leading efforts related to building Windows support into Kubernetes. The project allows us to take our Windows and enterprise expertise and advance Kubernetes along those dimensions through direct contribution,” Schuller said.
Schuller went on to say that the main advantage of being part of CNCF lies in “giving vendors and end users a common forum to jointly shape the expectations and standards associated with Kubernetes. This common ground ensures that everyone can safely voice their needs and concerns and be heard.”
Founded in July 2015 by 22 member organizations, including CoreOS, Docker, Google, Twitter, and others, CNCF is a Linux Foundation collaborative project that aims to create and drive the adoption of a new set of common container technologies to improve the overall developer experience, pave the way for faster code reuse, improve machine efficiency, reduce costs, and increase the overall agility and maintainability of applications.
The Linux Foundation announced in March that Google would transfer IP for its open source Kubernetes project to the CNCF, laying the foundation for a new commercial ecosystem around the project.
