With stateful applications now making up over half of containerized applications, Diamanti thinks multi-cluster Kubernetes management has become essential.
Diamanti Spektra 3.0
San Jose-based Diamanti, which makes a bare-metal hyperconverged platform for Kubernetes and containers, has introduced their Spektra 3.0 software, which adds several important new capabilities. Spektra now has cloud agnostic multi-cluster Kubernetes management, which also facilitates its ability to migrate stateful applications across clusters. It also has a new policy-based multi-tenancy capability, which gives both MSPs and enterprises the ability to manage multiple clients with secure isolation between them. MSPs will be a new channel for Diamanti.
“This is a major release, which takes our platform to the next level,” said Jenny Fong, Diamanti’s VP of Marketing. “We have enabled multi-cluster multi cloud Kubernetes while also adding new capabilities around stateful applications. In addition, we have added a little of flavour of our own, with multi-site resiliency.
“Diamanti in the past was more focused on infrastructure management, with an on-prem appliance,” Fong stated. “With this release, we are really moving up the stack to not just support our own platform, but other infrastructure as well. With 3.0 we will be able to support clusters in Azure. We are also introducing a lot of capabilities around managing clusters.”
Fong said that this extension of what Diamanti can do was motivated by the inability of current Kubernetes management solutions to deal with the fact that stateful applications like databases, AI and machine learning now make up a majority of containerized applications in the enterprise, according to 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
“This expansion of stateful applications getting containerized in Kubernetes, which was originally focused around stateless Web apps,” was the driver for this release,” Fong said. “There is a need for clusters of Kubernetes, and a lot of the industry is moving towards multi-cluster solutions that are managers of managers. The problem is that if you don’t have solutions going into the actual data, they reboot the applications from scratch every time they enter a cluster.”
With Diamanti Spektra, Kubernetes clusters can be provisioned and administered from a single control plane, either in the data centre, at the edge, or in the cloud. The first public cloud to be supported will be Microsoft Azure, followed by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.
The introduction of policy-based multi-tenancy for management of multiple tenants across multiple clusters was a logical extension of this.
“Once you support multi-cluster you tend to support multiple teams and tenants, so we added additional resources management and access controls,” Fong indicated. “This involves an umbrella-like management structure to give MSPs the ability to support multiple clients with secure isolation between them. We now have that level of access control and resource management to strongly support that MSP use case.”
MSPs are essentially a new market for Diamanti, which has an all-channel go-to-market strategy, but hasn’t really worked with this particular channel before.
“Our existing base is enterprise, but we see the opportunity with MSPs,” Fong said. “None of the other players in the Kubernetes space have provided MSPs with a strong solution. We have been in conversation with MSPs about this. They are trying to leverage existing stacks. We can offer them a better one.”
Many MSPs tend to be shy about offering services based around new technologies, but Diamanti thinks that containers have reached such a critical mass that there won’t be such reluctance here.
“MSPs are following what their customers ask for, and when there is demand for new services, the MSP responds to that,” Fong commented. “This is really the crossing of the chasm for Kubernetes. With 451 Research saying that a majority of apps are now stateful, there’s a lot of opportunity. We think that MSPs will jump on to this.”
