Tech Backgrounder: Devtron, the K8s-Native DevOps Platform

Devtron abstracts out Kubernetes complexity and helps companies adopt the container orchestrator at a rapid pace. With its Kubernetes-aware workflow across the build, deployment, security, cost optimization and debugging stages of the software supply chain, Devtron helps organizations rapidly improve their developer productivity and mature their DevOps practice on Kubernetes simultaneously.

Differentiator

Devtron is focused on increasing the maturity of the software supply chain for Kubernetes (K8s) and as such competes with Harness to some extent. However, Devtron offers the following unique capabilities:

• Devtron touches every aspect of Kubernetes, including build, deployment, security, cost optimization, visibility and debugging to speed up the adoption of Kubernetes.
• Devtron allows developers to have superior developer experience without vendor lock-in, through deep integrations with their preferred open source tools like Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Clair, Trivy, KEDA, Knative and Flagger, to name a few.
• Devtron provides higher-level constructs like ephemeral environments, environment drift management, multi-cluster deployment, and cluster debugging, thereby allowing companies to rapidly improve their DevOps maturity and have faster release cycles.

Problem Space

Companies that want to adopt Kubernetes are not happy with the pace of adoption and end up spending months and years to mature their Kubernetes systems because:

• The learning curve of Kubernetes is steep, requiring considerable investment in upskilling  developers/operators.
• Kubernetes has low-level APIs, which get updated frequently — resulting in configuration mismanagement.
• The number of tools across the software supply chain from development through build and deployment is very high and they demand a high level of operational knowledge from users. As a result, hundreds of precious development hours are wasted.

Benefits of Devtron

Devtron aims to democratize the adoption of Kubernetes so that companies should be able to achieve a high level of Kubernetes maturity without having to make significant upfront investment. It also has a significant positive impact on devs’ development speed and allows them to release features and products at a much faster pace, and experiment with new technologies so that companies can focus on building competitive advantages.

“Devtron is a game changer because it enables companies to adopt Kubernetes faster. Development teams are able to deploy and manage microservices-based apps and configure their Kubernetes environments all within weeks rather than months and without in-house Kubernetes expertise. In doing so, Devtron helps teams overcome the complexities of migrating to Kubernetes while also saving them significant time and money.”

– Josh Zelman, principal at Insight Partners

Companies using Devtron have seen significant improvements in the adoption and stability of Kubernetes. Some of the companies were able to move about 20 microservices to production in Kubernetes in less than a month,  while others saw a significant increase in the number of microservices they ran, from 20-30 to more than 200 over a year, as they more than doubled their team size and expanded their product portfolio.

Company

Devtron’s co-founders have multi-decade experience working in fast-growing and category-leading companies across development, quality assurance, DevOps, data science, frontend development, machine learning, working on teams as individual contributors as well as as head of technologies. Devtron was born out of their first-hand frustration with the challenges of scaling DevOps systems with few, constrained DevOps resources, limited budgets and a high attrition rate.

Before Kubernetes, there was no standard way of interacting with the operating system and the software running on top of it. Kubernetes changed it all with its uniform API definitions, but it is not easy to adopt.

In fact, while adopting Kubernetes in their current organization, Devtron’s co-founders realized that complexity is one of the biggest roadblocks to the adoption of Kubernetes. Companies have to invest multi-millions of dollars over multiple years before they can get any meaningful benefits out of it.

Out of these observations came the thought of the open source product to democratize the adoption of Kubernetes,  so companies should be able to adopt Kubernetes irrespective of their funding and size.

Stack

Devtron runs on Kubernetes and that is its sole dependency. It can work with all flavors and versions of Kubernetes.

Partnerships/Customers

As open source product Devtron has thousands of installations across the U.S., Europe  and Southeast Asia, with notable paying customers including unicorns like Delhivery, BharatPe, Livspace, xoxoday, Tata1MG, Nykaa and many others.

Pricing

Pricing depends on the number of developers using Devtron, with complexities of environment such as the number of microservices, workloads, etc. Devtron offers tiered pricing,  depending upon more than the factors discussed above, and have an annual subscription contract billed monthly.