Rafay Launches Technical Alliance Program and Kubernetes Addon Catalog to Tame the Complexity of Kubernetes Management and Operations

GitLab Inc., F5 NGINX, MinIO, New Relic, Sysdig and Other Market Leaders Team Up with Rafay to Ensure Success of Kubernetes Projects

Rafay Systems, the leading platform provider for Kubernetes Management and Operations, today announced the launch of the Rafay Technical Alliance Program. Driven by customer demand, the program accelerates the ongoing innovation effort between Rafay and strategic partners to deliver enhanced value to mutual customers.

Kubernetes adoption within enterprises is frequently stalled by the overwhelming number of software addons that require extensive integration and maintenance, especially as the number of workloads and clusters increase. As a result, enterprises struggle to manage the growing time, cost and resources required to manage this “Kubernetes jigsaw puzzle.” To alleviate these burdens and ensure the success of enterprise Kubernetes projects, market leaders including GitLab Inc., F5 NGINX, MinIO, New Relic, Sysdig and others have partnered with Rafay to deliver ready to use, technical integrations across numerous software categories that are critical for modern applications and Kubernetes environments. Rafay also introduced its new Kubernetes Addon Catalog, making it easy for enterprise platform teams to add and configure software addons in cluster blueprints and for developers to self-service curated cluster configurations, in just a few clicks.

The rise in adoption of container technology and the need for companies to remain agile while deploying products at scale has contributed to the burgeoning global application container market, expected to reach $12 billion by 2028. However, platform teams and developers are overburdened with the overhead associated with integrating and managing the myriad of software addons and require a better way to standardize the software development process and improve developer efficiency. If these complex environments are not appropriately managed, productivity issues can grow.

“No Kubernetes deployment is an island. To be successful, Kubernetes requires a number of integrated addons to integrate and work harmoniously,” said Mahesh Chaudhari, vice president of global business development and alliances at Rafay Systems. “Working alongside our customers and market-leading partners, Rafay has strategically selected the solutions critical to making modern infrastructure operations simple, fast and accessible—driving end-user innovation to meet enterprise demand.”

Partner participation in the Rafay Technical Alliance Program grants access to in-depth technical and sales training, Kubernetes experts, co-selling and co-marketing resources for a “better together” technological experience for mutual customers. As a result, Rafay and its partners provide enterprises with a seamless experience for best-in-class innovation.

Charter members of Rafay’s Technical Alliance Program include Araali Networks, Archera, Armory.io, Tigera (Calico), CloudCasa by Catalogic, Datadog, Dynatrace, Equinix, GitLab, HashiCorp, Ondat, MinIO, NetScaler (formerly Citrix ADC), New Relic, Ping Identity, Sysdig, Tetrate and Zenlayer. Each partner’s technology is now available in Rafay’s Kubernetes Addon Catalog. The Catalog is a collection of applications that enterprises can use to easily choose and deploy addons to Kubernetes clusters as a workload template, a workload or via a cluster blueprint. Enterprises can also create one or more custom catalogs for use within different organizations or unique sets of applications or infrastructures.

Supporting Quotes:

“Kubernetes is rapidly becoming the lingua franca for multi-cloud infrastructure deployments. At GitLab we are investing in the Kubernetes ecosystem through our own Helm chart and Operator-based solutions to meet customers where they are and enable them to move forward to adopt technologies on whatever platform they choose,” said Nima Badiey, vice president of alliances at GitLab. “We’re pleased to join Rafay’s partner program to provide even deeper Kubernetes accessibility in our One DevOps Platform.”

“Security should not be an afterthought, but an essential part of all aspects of container-based applications running on Kubernetes from build to deploy and runtime stages,” said Amit Gupta, chief product officer at Tigera. “With Calico, Tigera and Rafay are helping enterprises provide active security that prevents, detects and mitigates risks in Kubernetes-based applications. Calico is the most widely deployed networking and security solution for Kubernetes, and we are excited to partner with Rafay to bring Calico's extensive security and observability capabilities, including eBPF-based dataplane, to organizations adopting Kubernetes.”

“We see that reducing complexity, strengthening protection, increasing uptime and getting better visibility at scale for their apps are top of mind for many organizations adopting Kubernetes,” said Brian Ehlert, director of product management at F5 NGINX. “In partnership with F5 NGINX, Rafay’s KOP delivers improved customer experiences with integrated cluster blueprints for NGINX Ingress Controller, a part of NGINX’s Secure Kubernetes Connectivity toolset that helps scale, observe, govern and secure apps and workloads in Kubernetes.”

“Rafay’s ability to standardize application metrics, events and logs across fleets of clusters is instrumental in upleveling our best of breed offering for logging and monitoring Kubernetes,” said Akhil Kapoor, vice president of cloud and product partnerships at New Relic. “Our partnership enables better visibility and monitoring within New Relic’s platform, and we look forward to continuing to provide every engineer with observability into their stack.”

“Many companies have home-grown tooling for generating Kubernetes clusters from templates. Rafay is an on-demand SaaS solution that enables this without requiring custom code and tooling,” said Stephen Atwell, principal product manager at Armory.io. “Rafay provides our customers with a streamlined way to ensure all clusters they provision are automatically connected to Armory’s products so their application developers can easily and reliably deploy their code.”

"Customers are embracing Service Mesh for their cloud native applications to not just automate complex application deployments but also streamline their application runtime, day two operations and security," said Saptak Sen, vice president of alliance and integration at Tetrate. "Combining Tetrate Service Bridge and Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations provides enterprise customers a comprehensive platform to simplify deployment, security and day two operations for their business critical applications."

“The Rafay platform is a turnkey offering for automating cluster management, modern stateful application deployment and operations at scale,” said Richard Olver, CEO at Ondat. “Together, the Ondat and Rafay solution stack empowers customers to provision managed Kubernetes data-driven services such as Postgres, Kafka or any stateful workload, ensuring performance, consistency and security.”

"Enterprises are accelerating innovation using Kubernetes as the backbone of their cloud-native architectures," said Bryan Smoltz, vice president of technology partnerships at Sysdig. "Rafay is helping to simplify Kubernetes for developer and operation teams. By partnering with Sysdig, Rafay is ensuring its customers have access to deep insights to secure their containers and cloud from source to run."

“In today’s cloud-native world, Kubernetes is everywhere." said Garima Kapoor, chief operations officer and founder of MinIO. "Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform, paired with MinIO’s high-performance Kubernetes-native object storage helps our joint customers deliver industry leading innovation with incredible speed—on every public cloud, every Kubernetes distribution, from the private cloud to the edge."

To learn more about how Rafay and its existing partnerships can help solve Kubernetes challenges, schedule a demo. If you're interested in joining Rafay's partner ecosystem, sign up here.

Additional Resources

• See the full list of Technical Alliance Partners
• See Rafay’s Documentation for more information about the Rafay Kubernetes Addon Catalog
• Follow Rafay on Twitter and Linkedin
• Read the Rafay Blog: The Kubernetes Current

About Rafay Systems

Rafay delivers the first Kubernetes management and operations platform purpose-built for platform teams. Rafay’s cloud-made solution, Kubernetes Operations Platform, provides the automation and governance capabilities that platform teams need to standardize Kubernetes clusters, toolsets and workflows. With Rafay, platform teams at MoneyGram, GuardantHealth, Verizon and many other companies are operating Kubernetes environments across data centers, public cloud and Edge environments with centralized visibility and access control, environment standardization, and guardrail enforcement. As a result, platform teams are able to deliver self-service and automation capabilities that delight developer and operations teams. For more information, please visit www.rafay.co.

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