We sat down with Radhesh Menon, CMO of Robin Systems to get his insight into where the Kubernetes community is heading from an enterprise workload perspective.

Observation @Kubecon

Menon said that KubeCon reminded him of the early days of OpenStack in a good way. “I know there is a lot of learnings from the OpenStack journey, but you will also see the excitement in the eyes of the customers, in the eyes of the ecosystem players. The fact is that there is a rapid maturation both in terms of the deployment complexity and set of ISV solutions that are coming into play right there,” he said.

He said that security is becoming a key area of focus? “We have started to talk about security because now we are getting past the ability of Kubernetes to be the infrastructure management fabric,” he said, “One of the areas that we need to start focusing on is how do you bring more workloads into Kubernetes. I think the table setting is perfect for that conversation. To me, the take away from KubeCon is knocking on the doors of the mainstream with Kubernetes.”

Challenges customers face when they embrace Kubernetes

As exciting as Kubernetes is, it’s a fact that Kubernetes is very complex. So when customers plan to bring their workloads to Kubernetes, what’s the biggest hurdle they face?

“I think typically the challenges stay in two buckets – 1) Do the core technology pieces exist for you to be able to bring in a solution; 2) The other one is more in terms of process and culture change perspective. Is there enough of a mandate to bring in a change to bring in a new agile way of doing things,” he said.

He talked about how companies handle the cultural challenge. “Assuming there is a conviction that bringing in agility is important, then the focus shifts to how do you bring the pieces required to address more workloads,” he said.

Menon also talked about the solutions Robin Systems brings to the table to help customers better leverage Kubernetes. Watch the whole interview on YouTube.