Our CEO Why the Time for Kubernetes Optimization is NOW

At StormForge, we’re listeners. And what we hear from customers and our industry peers often creates conversations that share a common thread. You Asked, We Answered is one way to share our thoughts on the topics we encounter most often and provide our perspective on the questions people want to be answered.

Today, Matt Provo, StormForge Founder and CEO, takes on the question: Why is now the right time for optimization?

Kubernetes is no longer a “nice to have.” It has become a “must have.” Gartner estimates that more than 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms by 2025 – that’s up from 30% in 2021. As organizations seek portability, flexibility, and scalability for these workloads, they’re turning to Kubernetes. In essence, Kubernetes is becoming the new standard.

But the growth in Kubernetes hasn’t been without pain. The number of workloads moving into production for any given organization is exploding. And, as that occurs, the operational challenge – and pain – is acute. We all hear the mantras driving business these days: move faster, stay ahead, compete. But what happens when you ignore the reality facing the people tasked with developing and running apps? What happens when they’re forced to deal with spiraling cloud costs? To make trade-offs without knowing the impact those trade-offs will have on performance or resource consumption? And how do they even know they’re making the right decisions until it’s too late? The answer is optimization.

Most organizations quickly realize that they have no choice other than to optimize their Kubernetes organizations and applications. Unfortunately, this realization often occurs in production at scale. They start seeing the signs that applications they developed aren’t optimized. And what are their options? Well, manually tuning is one, of course, but it isn’t the best approach. It requires a very unique and specialized skill set, and those individuals are in short supply. Plus, with billions of possible configurations, manual tuning is largely ineffective. Optimization isn’t easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it. This is where StormForge comes in.

We recognized that we could solve complex operational problems by optimizing cloud-native infrastructure and applications with machine learning and other advanced technologies. And, we knew that in order to deliver true optimization, developers and ops managers needed to be able to incorporate optimization as a standard part of the cloud-native development cycle – it’s the only way to truly maximize the return on Kubernetes investments.

Now is the time for optimization because automation and ML – and StormForge’s unique use of these technologies – have finally made it not only possible, but even easy to optimize from pre-production to production.