Apprenda Acquires Kismatic and Launches a Kubernetes Distro
Enterprise PaaS cloud platform provider Apprenda continues to be bullish on the Kubernetes open source container orchestration tool. The company has acquired enterprise Kubernetes support company Kismatic, its first acquisition, and has launched a new Kubernetes distribution.
“Kismatic was one of the first companies to really pursue enterprise Kubernetes,” said Sinclair Schuller, CEO, and co-founder of Apprenda. “They looked at this software Google released and saw all this power, but they also saw enterprises would use Kubernetes very differently, so started building out capabilities around security, authentication, auditing.”
One of the fastest growing open source projects, Kubernetes was developed by Google to offer organizations that same container-based workflow architecture it uses in-house (originally called the Borg). With the acquisition in place, Apprenda will start offering commercial support subscripts for Kubernetes deployments.
Kismatic founder Patrick Reilly will serve as Apprenda’s corporate chief technology officer and lead its Kubernetes strategy. Reilly is also a governing board member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which oversees the Kubernetes project. Before Kismatic, Patrick founded Orly Atomics, which was acquired by Mesosphere.
Founded in 2007, Apprenda’s original mission has been to offer enterprise-level on-premises PaaS cloud services and cultivated an expertise supporting Microsoft .Net and Windows Server deployments, and later expanded to Enterprise Java as well. The growing interest around Kubernetes has proven irresistible to Apprenda however; In March, the company started supporting Kubernetes within its cloud services.
Going forward, Apprenda will continue and expand Kismatic’s existing business operations. It will offer support subscriptions, with guaranteed service level agreements, and professional services. It will also continue to develop tooling for integrating Kubernetes with the Apprenda platform, including Kubernetes enterprise plugins for identity management (LDAP/Active Directory), Kerberos authentication, and rich auditing.
Kismatic also hosted the KubeCon conference to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, though donated the event to CNCF.
Apprenda is one of many companies building enterprise strategies around Kubernetes. CoreOS offers a commercially supported distribution called Tectonic, and Red Hat has built Kubernetes into its OpenShift PaaS platform OpenShift.
“CNCF is excited about the latest development with two of our founding members Apprenda and Kismatic. With this acquisition, the industry benefits are manifold with a more robust company committed to advancing CNCF technology and the transition to a new cloud-native computing paradigm,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF interim executive director, in a statement. “If companies do not bridge the gap between traditional IT and cloud-native technologies, they could fall considerably behind.”
CoreOS is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
