Guest: Shaun O’Meara (LinkedIn)
Company: Mirantis (Twitter) 
Show: Let’s Talk, KubeCon 

Managing multiple Kubernetes clusters can be challenging. Mirantis is keen to tackle this complexity and has recently launched k0smotron, a new paradigm to deploy and manage Kubernetes control planes giving it a competing edge over SUSE’s Rancher and VMware’s Tanzu. Mirantis has added support for enterprises so that if someone does run into a problem with the platform deployment, there is someone to help.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Shaun O’Meara, Field CTO at Mirantis, talks about the company’s new open source project k0smotron, and how it is helping enterprises deploy and manage control planes. He talks about some of the driving forces behind the project and how it helps to address some of the challenges of Kubernetes such as reducing the costs of running control planes and the complexity.

Check out k0smotron

Key highlights from this video interview:

• O’Meara gives us an update from Mirantis saying Lens’ platform capabilities have been a key focus over the past year.
• The company has just released k0smotron, a new paradigm to deploy and manage Kubernetes control planes. He goes on to explain the meaning behind the name and how it helps enterprises build Kubernetes clusters at speed in multiple environments simply and quickly.
• O’Meara talks about the driving forces behind k0smotron: Kubernetes clusters typically have a control plane of three to five nodes with hundreds of workers added to these, which creates a lot of complexity; if you want to create lots of clusters you need to keep creating those three control planes, and building control planes is complex.
• K0smotron aims to simplify building Kubernetes control planes. O’Meara explains how they have containerized it so that they no longer need the three nodes and they can spin up a new Kubernetes control plane with three lines of Yaml in 7 seconds. He discusses the benefits of this approach.
• O’Meara discusses some of the ideal use cases they are seeing are customers (often in the financial services space) running Kubernetes clusters on-prem, who have mandates to consume public cloud but do not want to be locked into a public cloud provider. However, they want control of their control plane.
• Kubernetes can be complex and O’Meara feels that it is becoming very commoditized. He talks about having a cluster at AWS which while you are only paying for your worker, you are also being locked into AWS. He discusses cheaper ways to run the control plane and how K0smotron is helping to reduce the complexity.
• Mirantis has built a successful business based on open-source and O’Meara tells us about the balance of contributing back to the open-source community and people needing to consume the open source and pay for that support. Giving back to the community also enables them to see more use cases and opportunities to standardize.
• O’Meara explains what is in the pipeline for Mirantis: looking at different ways to be able to define Kubernetes clusters and focusing on the simplicity of experience in the Lens space and K0smotron.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.