Obsidian Systems, a supplier of enterprise-ready open source software solutions, has entered into a strategic partnership with Rancher Labs, a cloud native start-up that delivers Kubernetes-as-a-Service across any infrastructure.
Even though other cloud vendors provide Kubernetes-as-a-Service, Rancher is the only organisation that is completely agnostic to enable a business to run Kubernetes in any way that is required. For example, the company can use multiple cloud-hosted Kubernetes offerings from a single Rancher and can still tie the authentication back to a single source. This means there is no need to use different identities when using multiple cloud environments.
With the combination of Kubernetes and Ranchers’ infrastructure-agnostic approach, this facilitates rapid migration between different infrastructure providers without a high cost of change. Businesses across Africa can now run their applications in one place and if another major cloud provider enters the market with significant cost changes or better performance, they can easily take advantage of this.
“Given the unique connectivity and power challenges on the continent, Rancher provides us with resilient workloads that span multiple data centres for the best possible redundancy. This offering is our preferred way of delivering modern applications to our customers,” says Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems.
“Rancher will continue to innovate in the Kubernetes space and look to drive adoption utilising partners such as Obsidian Systems to give that local on the ground presence and market knowledge to help Africa take advantage of the benefits that Kubernetes brings,” says Chris Urwin, VP of Field Engineering at Rancher Labs.
Kubernetes is revolutionary in the way that it fundamentally changes the way that applications are developed, deployed, monitored, and secured. Using Kubernetes, a business can get its entire infrastructure up and running within minutes.
“The partnership with Rancher makes a lot of strategic sense for us. They are a market leader and committed to open source and open standards. Virtual machines have become bulky and take up a lot of storage. With Rancher and Kubernetes, a company becomes more agile and can get systems in place within milliseconds. It makes the entire administration process so much easier and is such an elegant technology. And even though companies across all industry sectors can benefit from this, we anticipate the initial growth to come from those in the financial services market looking for a secure, robust, and reliable offering that equips them for the digital world,” adds van Staden.