Rafay at Gartner IOCS 2023¶
The Rafay team was at Gartner IOCS 2023 in Las Vegas from 5th to 7th Dec, 2023. In this blog, we summarize some of our announcements at Gartner IOCS 2023, describe some of the cutting edge demos we showcased to the attendees at the event and also highlight some of our observations/takeaways.
Rafay Booth¶
This is the first time that the Rafay team had a presence at the Gartner IOCS conference. This year had ~5,100 attendees and the theme of the event was, "Accelerating Value: The Platform Revolution".
Our Announcements & Demos¶
We announced the general availability of the Rafay Cloud Automation Platform. It combines Rafay’s Kubernetes and environment management offerings into a single platform. This unique combination enables platform teams to deliver automation and self-service capabilities to developers, data scientists and other cloud users.
We also announced availability of Infrastructure Templates for Generative AI. We showcased the enhanced AI marketplace experience that platform teams can offer to their developers and data scientists at the conference.
Top takeaways & Observations¶
1. Self Service is a top 2024 initiative¶
We heard from a lot of customers across verticals (healthcare, financial services, public sector) that developer self-service is a top 2024 initiative for them. Platform teams that we spoke to do not want their developers to get bogged down by a time consuming ticket driven process and want to enable self-service. The workflows that the Rafay platform enables (self-service with guardrails) resonated extremely well with these platform teams. As expected, we heard from customers that their choice of self-service interface is varied (including ServiceNow, Backstage, Git)and Rafay's flexible interface model makes it easier for them to consume the platform capabilities according to their preference.
This is consistent with predictions by leading industry analysts including Gartner.
By 2026, 75% of organizations with infrastructure platform teams will provide self-service, internal developer platforms to improve developer experience and accelerate product innovation, an increase from less than 40% in 2023. Source: How to Implement Cluster Fleet Management for Complex Kubernetes Deployments
2. Platform practice for Hybrid Cloud¶
There were customers that we spoke to who run their applications primarily in their on-prem infrastructure today but have either moved a portion or are in the process of evaluating moving them to the cloud. For them, getting to a point where they implement a standard platform practice to operate in a hybrid cloud environment is extremely important.
A sizable portion of these customers were Azure customers. The Rafay team shared the Reference templates that we have put together for Azure, this was much appreciated by customers and was in line with how they were planning on templatizing 'infrastructure as service' for their development teams.
3. Scaling Kubernetes Operations in an efficient manner¶
There are ongoing operations where Platform teams are spending an inordinate amount of resources and this is becoming increasingly difficult to justify to their management. Examples for these include:
- Keeping up with new K8s versions because of API deprecation issues with applications deployed on the clusters
- Updating add-ons on an ongoing basis because of security vulnerabilities or newer versions of add-ons being available
We showed how a platform engineer can sweep through a fleet of Amazon EKS/Azure AKS clusters to determine the list of incompatible resources by cluster, by namespace that need to be updated before the EKS/AKS cluster can be upgraded to a new Kubernetes version. We also showed how a platform engineer can sweep through a fleet of Amazon EKS/Azure AKS clusters and update vulnerable software add-ons with the latest version.
Next Steps¶
If you missed us at the Gartner IOCS conference and would like to see Rafay's Cloud Automation Platform in action, please reach out to schedule a demo.
Our sincere thanks to readers of our blog who spend time reading our product blogs and encourage us to share our thoughts frequently. Please Contact the Rafay Product Team if you would like us to write about other topics.