Guest: Haseeb Budhani (LinkedIn)
Company: Rafay Systems (Twitter)

Although Kubernetes has been on some companies’ radars for several years, many enterprises are still in the early stages of adoption and sometimes it is only once their applications go to production that they are uncovering a myriad of sticking points. Some enterprises are moving towards platform engineering to help with standardization but even with a centralized approach, Kubernetes can be a challenging environment to grapple with. 

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk recorded at the 2023 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam, Swapnil Bhartiya catches up with Haseeb Budhani, Co-Founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, to talk about the state of adoption of Kubernetes and how a platform engineering approach can potentially be helpful for enterprises. Budhani goes on to discuss some of the key challenges they are facing and how Rafay Systems is helping to solve these problems. 

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Budhani talks about the shift they are seeing from small teams doing Kubernetes to enterprise, and the push to standardize Kubernetes with platform engineering. He discusses why the platform engineering approach can be beneficial for enterprises and how this in turn benefits developers. 
• There is a trend toward platform engineering teams becoming the owners of the infrastructure, the pipelines, and the CD platform. Budhani explains how this approach for enterprises allocating resources ensures the fastest progress with the fewest number of people. He discusses how this can help bridge the skill set shortage. 
• Budhani talks about enterprise adoption of Kubernetes and how the market is evolving. He talks about the challenges they are facing now that their real applications are going into production. He talks about the approach enterprises are taking in wanting to implement governance and guardrails around Kubernetes and why this is a good thing. 
• Rafay Systems focuses on helping enterprises manage their governance controls, helping them have visibility across multiple clouds, and ensuring the right people have the right dashboards. 
• Rafay Systems has customers in various sectors including financial services, healthcare, and high technology. He discusses their common need for standardization and how the platform engineering, centralized approach comes into play. 
• Budhani talks about how many of their enterprise customers have a center of excellence organization where the various people in the team come to an agreement on what things must run on a cluster, and who has access to what. He discusses how Rafay Systems help support them with configuration management and standardization. 
• Rafay Systems is conducting two demos this week, where they hope to be able to get feedback from the developer customer. Budhani talks us through their Environment Manager platform, which they also showed at KubeCon, and tells us how it is helping solve some of the challenges for their customers. 

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.