What is Kubernetes-as-a-Service?
According to wikis, hacker forum discussions and the team itself, Kubernetes is so-named because it translates from (κυβερνήτης in Greek) to governor, helmsman or captain — and further, ‘gubernare’ translates from Latin to government.
Which all makes perfect sense.
Because Kubernetes is an open source orchestration technology used to manage Linux containers across private, public and hybrid cloud environments.
Or… in the words of the people behind the technology: Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for managing containerised workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation.
So if that’s Kubernetes, what is Kubernetes-as-a-Service?
Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) is way of getting hold of that containerised workload orchestration and management know-how, but in smaller (ah-hem, containerised) chunks where the ability to manage and tear down on-premise and cloud-based container clusters is supplied on-demand on a project-by-project basis.
Who’s doing KaaS?
One firm based in San Diego is and it’s called Kazuhm — pronounced ‘kah-zoom’.
Resource allocation (& recapture)
Kazuhm suggests that tech teams want to use more containers to manage compute-heavy workloads, but container management solutions do not [typically] address concerns about resource allocation to successfully manage containers in multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premise distributed computing environments — specifically allowing users to run workloads on desktops.
“With today’s focus on agility, it is more important than ever to be able to quickly and easily stand up and tear down clusters without headaches and excessive costs,” said Kazuhm CEO Tim O’Neal. “While adoption of Kubernetes is rapidly increasing, many people who recognise its benefits still do not know where to start, so they haven’t yet implemented it. We believe resource recapture and a highly user-friendly experience are two keys to making containers and distributed computing accessible to all.”
Kazuhm allows organizations to recapture existing IT resources and unused processing power and manage workloads across a fabric of desktops, datacentres, cloud and edge.
This creates a Kubernetes on-demand environment with organisations’ existing hardware and/or cloud resources. Kazuhm says it eliminates dedicated hardware requirements and delivers savings on cloud costs.
Kazuhm KaaS is agnostic across clouds. Regardless of the organisation’s preferred cloud vendor, the user interface remains consistent.
Calming command complexity
As a result, the user does not need to know commands or the specifics of how to manage containers in different clouds (e.g. AWS vs. Google Cloud).
There is also ‘push-button’ application deployment here, so users outside of the DevOps team (such as data scientists or data engineers) can deploy container-based applications after they have been set up.
Kazuhm’s KaaS offering is available at no cost for up to 10 on-premise nodes at the time of writing — and unlimited cloud resources can be managed the Kazuhm Basic product.