DEVOPSdigest

Rafay Systems announced automation and monitoring enhancements to its flagship Kubernetes Management Cloud (KMC).

These enhancements expand the scope and scale of mission-critical Kubernetes (K8s) deployments across global enterprise environments, and include dashboards for global visibility of clusters spanning multiple operating environments, single-click upgrades for Amazon EKS and upstream Kubernetes clusters, and overrides for workloads and blueprints for multi-cluster deployments.

These features and upgrades were developed to meet growing user demand, and collectively automate and streamline critical Kubernetes operations workflows, creating a repeatable and reliable Kubernetes practice for enterprise IT and DevOps teams.

“Now that Kubernetes is taking center stage for mission-critical applications, many global enterprises that originally adopted a DIY strategy for Kubernetes Management are rethinking their plans of record. At the level of scale many of them are finding themselves needing, traditional methods of manual provisioning, DIY maintenance of clusters, homegrown app deployment tooling, to name a few, are resulting in a net-negative return on investment,” stated Haseeb Budhani, CEO of Rafay. “Rafay is...specifically designed to make operating 100s of clusters as simple as a handful of clusters.”

Enterprise-Wide Dashboards: DevOps organizations can’t manage what they can’t see. Rafay’s enterprise-wide dashboards ensure reliable operations with a single, organization-wide view of resources consumed, user and access activity, critical alerts, and the overall health of every Kubernetes cluster deployed across all environments. Each internal team is also provided a dashboard that helps them visualize sub-fleets tied to Rafay’s existing native RBAC support. Visibility spans across any environment, including on-premises and public cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI.

1-Click Upgrades for Amazon EKS Clusters: It is critical to have a reliable, repeatable, and efficient cluster upgrade process to ensure both the Kubernetes version for the cluster and the operating system for the nodes are kept current and up to date. However, upgrading a fleet of Kubernetes clusters often ends up being a multi-day task with various cluster components being upgraded manually. This manual process is burdensome, error prone and time consuming. With Rafay KMC, administrators gain seamless, in-place, 1-click upgrade workflows for Amazon EKS environments. Fine-grained controls enable admins to upgrade EKS control planes, worker node groups, and critical cluster add-ons (core-dns, kube-proxy and aws-node), as well as the worker node AMIs in a controlled, phased manner. Traditionally manual and error-prone steps such as pre- and post-upgrade checks are automatically performed to detect and report any known issues. A detailed upgrade history is automatically maintained for auditability.

Configuration Overrides for Clusters and Workloads: When resources need to be deployed to a fleet of Kubernetes clusters, it is critical to be able to dynamically customize the resources with cluster-specific requirements. Without this, users will be saddled with the operational burden of managing artifacts by cluster, resulting in unnecessary duplication. With overrides for cluster blueprints and workloads, the same artifact can now be deployed to a fleet of clusters with customizable configurations that can vary on a cluster by cluster basis. Rafay simplifies the creation and management of overrides, enabling easier, more reliable and repeatable Kubernetes operations.