Haseeb Budhani

That sums up the sentiments of Haseeb Budhani, co-founder and CEO of Rafay, which delivers enterprise Kubernetes management software as a service. Although many of Rafay's customers run their Kubernetes clusters in public clouds, an increasingly large portion do not. Rafay uses Equinix Metal to test and validate workloads for businesses seeking an infrastructure alternative to public cloud.

Here's the story of what Rafay offers, why Budhani feels it's important to give equal weight to  the public cloud and to dedicated infrastructure and how Equinix Metal fits into Rafay’s strategy of ensuring that customers can run Kubernetes clusters reliably wherever they wish.

The Kubernetes Management Challenge

Kubernetes is a powerful platform, but it's also complicated. Enterprises tend to operate multi-cluster deployments, and Kubernetes’ native management tooling is not enough to operate and maintain those environments at scale.

This is where Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform comes in: it’s a management platform for large-scale multi-cluster and multi-environment Kubernetes deployments used by multiple teams. It also enables monitoring, security policy enforcement, GitOps-based management and more.

It enables enterprises to take full advantage of Kubernetes without having to build out custom management tooling (hardly an efficient use of resources for most organizations). As Budhani puts it, "If you’re in the pizza business, you should focus on making pizzas, not on building out a Kubernetes management platform that you’ll end up operating for life." The same goes for financial services, healthcare, life sciences and arguably any industry. Companies can focus on their core business while using a turnkey Kubernetes ops and management solution, developed by a large group of engineers over a five-year period to address large orgs’ unique Kubernetes management challenges.