Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Open source has become the de facto standard for building the software that underpins the complex infrastructure that runs everything from your favorite mobile apps to your company’s barely usable expense tool. Over the course of the last few years, a lot of new software is being deployed on top of Kubernetes, the tool for managing large server clusters running containers that Google open sourced five years ago.

Today, Kubernetes is the fastest growing open-source project and earlier this month, the bi-annual KubeCon+CloudNativeCon conference attracted almost 8,000 developers to sunny Barcelona, Spain, making the event the largest open-source conference in Europe yet.

To talk about how Kubernetes came to be, I sat down with Craig McLuckie, one of the co-founders of Kubernetes at Google (who then went on to his own startup, Heptio, which he sold to VMware); Tim Hockin, another Googler who was an early member on the project and was also on Google’s Borg team; and Gabe Monroy, who co-founded Deis, one of the first successful Kubernetes startups, and then sold it to Microsoft, where he is now the lead PM for Azure Container Compute (and often the public face of Microsoft’s efforts in this area).

Google’s cloud and the rise of containers

To set the stage a bit, it’s worth remembering where Google Cloud and container management were five years ago.

Evolute, a 3-year old startup out of Mountain View, officially launched the Evolute platform today with the goal of helping large organizations migrate applications to containers and manage those containers at scale.

Evolute founder and CEO Kristopher Francisco says he wants to give all Fortune 500 companies access to the same technology that big companies like Apple and Google enjoy because of their size and scale.

“We’re really focused on enabling enterprise companies to do two things really well. The first thing is to be able to systematically move into the container technology. And the second thing is to be able to run operationally at scale with existing and new applications that they’re creating in their enterprise environment,” Francisco explained.

While there are a number of sophisticated competing technologies out there, he says that his company has come up with some serious differentiators. For starters, getting legacy tech into containers has proven a time-consuming and challenging process. In fact, he says manually moving a legacy app and all its dependencies to a container has typically taken 3-6 months per application.

He claims his company has reduced that process to minutes, putting containerization within reach of just about any large organization that wants to move their existing applications to container technology, while reducing the total ramp-up time to convert a portfolio of existing applications from years to a couple of weeks.

Evolute management console. Screenshot: Evolute

The second part of the equation is managing the containers, and Francisco acknowledges that there are other platforms out there for running containers in production including Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration tool, but he says his company’s ability to manage containers at scale separates him from the pack.

“In the enterprise, the reason that you see the [containerization] adoption numbers being so low is partially because of the scale challenge they face. In the Evolute platform, we actually provide them the native networking, security and management capabilities to be able to run at scale,” he said.

The company also announced that it been invited to join the Chevron Technology Ventures’ Catalyst Program, which provides support for early stage companies like Evolute. This could help push Evolute to business units inside Chevron looking to move into containerization technology and be big boost for the startup.

The company has been around in since 2015 and boasts several other Fortune 500 companies beyond Chevron as customers, although it is not in a position to name them publicly just yet. The company has 5 full time employees and has raised $500,000 in seed money across two rounds, according to data on Crunchbase.

 CoreOS, the company behind the container-centric CoreOS Linux distribution and Tectonic container management service, today announced that it has raised a $28 million Series B round led by GV, the fund formerly known as Google Ventures. Other investors include Accel, Fuel Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and the Y Combinator Continuity Fund. In total, the company has… Read More