Rafay Systems unveils developer self-service capabilities for enterprise platform teams

Rafay Systems announced new capabilities that empower enterprise platform teams to provide developer self-service for faster application deployments with the necessary guardrails enterprises require.

With these new features, Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) provides platform teams with the most efficient way to establish Kubernetes standards and practices while freeing developers to innovate.

Today’s enterprise developers want autonomy in order to innovate and deploy their modern applications quickly. Platform teams want standardization and control for repeatability and governance. Finding the right balance between these requirements has been elusive for today’s enterprises, until now.

With Rafay, platform teams empower development teams with the ability to provision clusters using Terraform or GitOps workflows, as well as create and manage namespaces for their teams on dedicated or shared clusters. At the same time, platform teams maintain control through pre-approved, curated cluster blueprints, centralized Kubernetes policy definition and enforcement, and more. Platform teams also benefit from central visibility, health status and policy violation notifications across the entire Kubernetes fleet.

Developer self-service capabilities replace slow, ticket-based processes for requesting new infrastructure, or access to existing infrastructure. As a result, development teams can eliminate the largest developer productivity impediment – waiting for central IT to provision or provide access to Kubernetes clusters and infrastructure.

According to Lydia Leong, Distinguished VP and Analyst with Gartner for Technical Professionals, “Self-service — and more broadly, developer control over infrastructure — isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. Responsibility can be divided across the application life cycle, so that you can get benefits from ‘You build it, you run it’ without necessarily parachuting your developers into an untamed and unknown wilderness and wishing them luck in surviving because it’s not an Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) team problem any more.”

“Platform teams can leverage Rafay’s KOP to create standardized and repeatable automation that developers can consume as a service,” said Mohan Atreya, SVP of Products and Services for Rafay. “This allows developers to focus on building transformational products and rolling them out faster to customers versus spending valuable time trying to tame the complexity of Kubernetes management and operations.”

Rafay offers enterprises the following benefits:

• Velocity without sacrificing stability: Platform teams that empower application development teams with self-service enable container-based application development. Since all Kubernetes cluster namespaces are created within predefined standards, Rafay reduces human error which improves the stability of the underlying Kubernetes cluster.
• Creating autonomy while reducing risk: The self-service aspect enables developers to work asynchronously with the appropriate infrastructure configurations and quotas in place. This prevents excessive usage in terms of CPU and memory to control costs and avoid a monopoly of Kubernetes cluster resources.
• Accelerating deployments and innovation: By offloading Kubernetes cluster namespace creation and management to the development team, central IT and platform teams are no longer seen as a bottleneck to the engineering workflows using Kubernetes. The independence that developers gain makes it possible to spend more time innovating instead of worrying about infrastructure.
• Soft multi-tenancy with guardrails: Instituting quotas and the ability for development teams to have self-contained workspaces allows platform teams to reduce operational overhead and costs by taking advantage of shared clusters across teams with workspace isolation. This eliminates the need for platform teams to provision a cluster for each development team, thereby reducing cloud compute costs.
• Hard multi-tenancy: Rafay enables platform teams to allow development teams to create and operate multiple clusters to comply with isolation requirements. This enforces stricter lines of ownership, reduces infrastructure dependencies and prevents any negative consequences from other applications or application teams.