Appvia this week launched a distribution of Kubernetes that is easier to provision and deploy on behalf of developer teams.

Company CEO Jonathan Shanks says Appvia developed its open source Appvia Kore platform as an outgrowth of the experience company founders gained deploying Kubernetes clusters on behalf of the British Home Office. It quickly became apparent that other IT organizations would also need a prescriptive approach to deploying Kubernetes clusters for teams of developers in a highly repeatable fashion.

To address that issue, Appvia Kore includes a set of lifecycle management tools and templates that securely automate the provisioning of all the continuous integration (CI) pipelines developers need to have in place before they can start building applications on a Kubernetes cluster, says Shanks, noting in the absence of that automation it becomes more likely that mistakes will be made during manual configuration of one of the most complex IT platforms ever created.

While interest in adopting Kubernetes remains high alongside other open source technologies in the face of the current economic downturn, Shanks says many organizations are finding it challenging to operationalize Kubernetes clusters at scale. The Appvia Kore platform addresses that issue, ultimately lowering the barrier to entry required to adopt Kubernetes in terms of expertise, he says.

It’s not clear what the appetite for emerging platforms such as Kubernetes might be in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are, for example, sectors such as entertainment and educational services in which demand for application services continues to rise. There are other sectors, such as retail and hospitality, where the future is far less certain. Some organizations may choose to freeze all new development projects. Others may morph fledgling digital business initiatives into full-blown business continuity strategies. As part of those efforts, organizations may employ containers to quickly lift and shift legacy applications into the cloud to increase flexibility and potentially reduce costs. Once migrated to the cloud, however, it’s inevitable those applications would be modernized using microservices based on containers that would run on Kubernetes clusters.

Among those organizations that do opt to deploy Kubernetes clusters, the need to minimize operational costs will be pressing because the amount of budget allocated to any new development project is likely to be much more constrained. In fact, it’s going to be more challenging than ever to entice IT organizations to adopt Kubernetes unless the platform and all the layers of additional software required become more accessible to the average IT administrator.

Shanks says Appvia is hoping to generate enough momentum for its platform to attract the attention of the leadership of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). In an ideal world, Appvia Kore would become another CNCF project, he says.

In the meantime, IT leaders more than likely will encounter more instances of Kubernetes clusters strewn across the enterprise as developers continue to build new applications. The only real question now is the rate at which those new application projects based on Kubernetes will be moving into production.