GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Resource Management Solutionsv1.0

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Market Categories and Deployment Types
  3. Key Criteria Comparison
  4. GigaOm Radar
  5. Vendor Insights
  6. Analyst’s Take

1. Summary

As we learned in the associated GigaOm report, “Key Criteria for Evaluating Kubernetes Resource Management Solutions,” applications are being released at an unrelenting pace and with ever-increasing complexity. This scenario is largely a result of the rise of containerization, microservice application architectures, agile development methodologies, and increased automation. While a microservice architecture should be simple, an application likely consists of tens or hundreds of microservices; and since most microservices are containerized, it’s safe to say that most are deployed to a Kubernetes platform.

Kubernetes, however awesome and flexible, allows developers and application owners to deploy a container without guardrails—guardrails that would ensure some sensible configurations are applied. This often unintentional oversight includes configurations that apply to resources, such as CPU or memory limits and requests (upper and lower boundaries), storage configurations, and so on. In fact, unless an organization has gone through extensive efforts to apply some sensible guardrails, many applications deployed to Kubernetes have no resource configurations applied to them at all, meaning they compete for resources at whim. On the other hand, those that use resource configurations tend to “aim high” and “run low,” which can generate wasted resources that are sitting idle. Just as all systems need to have sensible capacity management strategies, Kubernetes does as well.

As business leaders evaluate Kubernetes resource management solutions, it’s important to keep the following in mind:

  • Resource management solutions should closely align with financial operations (FinOps) tooling, as a shared goal for FinOps and resource optimization solutions is to better align performance and cost.
  • Enterprises need an objective solution that can span public and private Kubernetes resources, ensuring that the focus is on reducing hard and soft costs (such as cloud spend or engineering time spent tuning systems).
  • This space is evolving quickly, which provides many different approaches to a similar problem; vendor roadmaps should be an important factor within an organization’s Kubernetes journey.

How to Read this Report

This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.