Next-Generation Kubernetes Management: Our Investment in Spectro Cloud

Few technologies have more influence over modern application development than Kubernetes. Since its initial open-source release seven years ago, Kubernetes has become the dominant standard for managing development teams’ application infrastructure.

Today, more than 80% of companies use Kubernetes in production, and this is only the beginning. As businesses lean into digital transformation initiatives, nearly 90% of decision-makers expect Kubernetes to play a more significant role in their infrastructure management over the next three years.

That said, as Kubernetes has become mainstream, development teams are starting to experience challenges running it at scale. Today’s developers want to run multiple Kubernetes clusters across multiple environments, but existing Kubernetes management solutions weren’t built with those challenges in mind. As a result, teams need a new set of tools for managing Kubernetes at scale, all while ensuring compatibility with their existing technologies and a simple experience for developers.

Spectro Cloud’s Solution

Spectro Cloud’s next-gen Kubernetes management platform harnesses the power of open-source Kubernetes with unique extensions that make complex environments simple. With Spectro Cloud, teams can manage any combination of new, existing, multi-cluster, or multi-distribution Kubernetes environments anywhere they want to – including a data center, cloud, bare metal, or edge environment.

Unlike other vendors who have customers deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters one-by-one, Spectro Cloud lets customers create “Cluster Profiles,” or templates that specify how a group of Kubernetes clusters should look. Each Cluster Profile features a set of interchangeable layers with integrations that work out-of-the-box. Leveraging its Cluster Profiles, Spectro Cloud enables developers to easily self-service Kubernetes stacks while granting IT teams complete flexibility, visibility, and control at production scale.

Using Spectro Cloud, teams can also import and manage existing Kubernetes clusters from any other platform (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMware). This makes it possible for any enterprise to use Spectro Cloud, regardless of where they are in their Kubernetes journey.

Stripes Leads Spectro Cloud’s $20M Series A

When we first met Spectro Cloud’s CEO, Tenry Fu, we were instantly captivated by his vision for building a category-defining solution to serve organizations operating Kubernetes at scale. Soon after, we surveyed enterprise buyers for their opinion on Spectro’s approach vs. other Kubernetes management products. The results were clear - 81% of buyers were interested in Spectro’s solution, while no competitor we asked about earned a positive net promoter score.

Given the Spectro Cloud team’s long history of building amazing products together, this was no surprise. Before founding Spectro, Tenry co-founded CliQr Technologies to help enterprises manage their cloud application infrastructure at scale. Spectro Co-Founders Saad Malik and Gautam Joshi soon joined Tenry at CliQr, and, together, they successfully sold the business to Cisco. As the new leaders of Cisco’s Cloud Platform Solutions Group, they helped many of Cisco’s customers transition to cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes. Spectro Cloud’s team has been solving application infrastructure challenges at scale for years, and in our conversations with market experts, we consistently heard there was “no one better” to build a product for this market.

At Stripes, we believe that amazing products are the foundation upon which every successful business is built, and Spectro Cloud embodies this philosophy perfectly. Spectro Cloud pairs novel Kubernetes technology with an intuitive consumer-internet-like UI that makes Kubernetes approachable and manageable for a market that has, historically, been held back by limited access to Kubernetes talent.

We look forward to partnering with the Spectro Cloud team as they simplify Kubernetes for enterprises everywhere, and we’re thrilled to welcome them to the Stripes family!