Nirmata had a great Google NEXT last week with our partner, Cognizant. The industry momentum continues to accelerate around Kubernetes. Validating the trends we saw at DockerCon, multiple companies in the space, including behemoths, are launching similar product strategies around Kubernetes, pushing adoption and giving enterprises more options for implementing Kubernetes.  

Coming back from the event, here are my key takeaways:

1. Hybrid Cloud – to gain enterprise adoption, Google announced GKE on-prem their hybrid cloud solution which leverages the GKE management plane to manage on-prem clusters. Last year, Microsoft has announced Azure Stack. And now, Google is using its Kubernetes expertise to extend into a hybrid cloud. We fully expect other cloud providers to follow suit. We see GKE on-prem as a nice validation of Nirmata’s multi-cloud application management architecture and strategy. Nirmata pioneered secure cloud-based application management for on-premises workloads four years ago and already supports bare-metal, vSphere, and OpenStack infrastructure. Since then, Nirmata has also introduced the Nirmata Private Edition, a complete on-premises solution where even the management plane runs in the customer’s private network as a scalable service.
2. Google Cloud Service Platform – Google announced a number of different tools to help build and operate Kubernetes workloads. With Istio, Cloud Build, Policy Manager and Knative, Google is bringing tools to address Kubernetes operational challenges. Given Nirmata’s focus on application management, we are thrilled to see others in the space also solving management challenges around Kubernetes. More on our unique solution here.
3. AI – Google has definitely made significant headway in making its AI easy to adopt with new features like Dialog flow, Cloud Vision, Contact Center AI etc. It was interesting to see many partners using these technologies to showcase their own use cases.
4. Enterprise Push – Google wants to leverage its hybrid strategy as a differentiator in pursuit of Enterprise customers.There is quite a bit of co-opetition though, evident from Cisco’s management plane for Kubernetes cluster management, that competes directly with GKE on-prem.

There were many other announcements, you can see them all here.

In line with Google NEXT, Nirmata made some key announcements –

1. Nirmata announced support for GKE on their SaaS and Enterprise Edition. Check out our demo video.
2. Nirmata announced the availability of new Jenkins Plugin now ready for download in the Jenkins marketplace.
3. Nirmata launched a new feature – Application Model Wizard to help customers create validated application manifests.