Bare Metal K8s – Saad Malik, Spectro Cloud

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another tech strung TV segment. I've got a new company a new First Time guest here on Textron TV to introduce you to let me introduce you to side my league sod.

Welcome to text on TV. Thanks for having me. Just want to make sure I got the name right?

Because I we pay attention to that. Yeah, it's sad molec exactly, right? Yeah.

Thank you start my life. Okay, so give us share with us. Give us your background your company and Some information.

Yeah, happy to thanks for again. Thank you for having me on board. My name is Saad Malik.

I'm the CTO and co-founder of spectrocloud. So we're a company's founded in 2019 focusing on making kubernetes accessible to all Enterprises. As you know, Alan kubernetes is a very complex platform with many different moving parts.

And so our goal was how do we provide that easy button for organizations to really be able to run kubernetes at scale? And so our unique value was taking kubernetes and breaking it into multiple different parts everything from the operating system the kubernetes layers and Integrations and essentially building it into a model that we call the cluster profile. And then once you have this profile, you can use it for your day one deployment into any environment.

We support environments from public Cloud private clouds data center bare metal Edge, you name it any environment that can exist you can take this model and not only only use it for deployment but also per day to operations and updates. words So would is that sort of a custom cool distro that you guys have great question. So what yeah, that's one of our core values for spectral cloud is not locking our users and Enterprises down to specific Integrations or even specific distros.

Out of the box. We've support for eight different distributions, right? You can think about everything from the cncf vanilla distribution that we've also package and hardened down to using K3.

Yes. Micro kubernetes any District that our customer wants to bring in they can model it in the model itself and then deploy it All right, very cool. Excellent.

And how's that distributed? Yeah, so we we provide a deployment in three different options. We have a multi-tenant SAS that we operate and run on behalf of our customers.

I would say 60% of our customers are on this multi-tenant size platform. But we do also offer a dedicated SAS offering for larger customers somebody who's you know, they realize that they don't want to maintain and manage the platform. But at the same time they they don't want to be shared with other tenants.

So we will operate a multitask away dedicated tenant for them. And then the last option is a self-hosted install. If you have your own kubernetes cluster on-prem or behind your own DPC.

You can install our Helm chart and get it up and running very quickly. Very cool. And you said the company's been around since 2019.

So it's got three years old Venture backed or yeah. We're seriously Venture back. 5 million dollars.

We have 20 plus different customers across Healthcare Finance retail everywhere you can imagine so yeah. Very cool. Excellent.

She thought well one other thing before we jump into what the meat of what I wanted to discuss with you today and that is for people who want to get more information on Spectra Cloud. com. com.

Yeah. That's PE. Well, spell it out for him.

Anyway, it's a video. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

com all one word. Excellent man. Thank you.

All right. Now that we've got all that out of the way. Let's let's settle into it.

I want to discuss with you today. And that is the idea of Kube on bear metal. Right?

Look. Our audience is pretty sophisticated especially around kubernetes Cloud native Tech in general, you know, when we talk about bare metal we're talking about running Coupe directly on a server server OS eliminating the hypervisor layer. right, which you know for most of public Cloud the hypervisor is Built in right you don't eliminate it.

If you go to like Lambda or some of the serverless. Platforms and Cloud you you know, that's sort of I guess bare metal. But you're not.

I don't know you consider that bare metal a serverless scuba Netties to be honest, like from our perspective. You don't ever realize it as an application of Atlanta function of the fast. You just run it the infrastructure behind it why they're experimental container running on a VM?

We have no idea. What are bare metal. I probably would assume for efficiencies.

They are running bare metal containers directly on it. So yeah, see I and maybe I'm just I'm old you're right. But when you tell me it's running on bare metal.

I'm I'm assuming it's running on a physical server that I could see touch rack mount or what have you right not, you know in even in serverless. I still see this. you know Farm of of Hardware that runs like some amorphous sort of serverless cloud if you will, so it doesn't to me that's not their metal, but that's I'm weird like that.

I I see I see for years. It's like a bare metal as a physical box versus a cloud a bare metal cloud is something that is able to operate tens of thousands of servers that able to maybe even orchestrate different functions that are being executed simultaneously. So right I see where you're coming from.

Yeah makes sense. Yep, so, you know one of the when I first was introduced to the idea of cool Barn bear metal side. I thought to myself.

Well, I guess this is for people who will never go to the cloud. You know what? I mean?

Nice little sub Niche Corner case kind of thing. I wouldn't you know, I wouldn't build a big company around it. Yeah.

You know we've seen that a I don't want to say a majority because it's nowhere near a majority but a decent subset of kubernetes deployments are being done on bare metal. So why? I mean in to be honest Allen, I think if we were to go back even 20 years.

Applications you should run on bare metal right? That was the only way this before even virtualization, right? But that's one of the biggest challenges Applications had before on bare metal was there was no easy solution for resource isolation.

So if you had multiple applications running on the same bare metal server itself, what would happen is that due to one noisy application? It could completely take over all the resources all the other applications that completely Starbucks and on the flip side what people used to do was they would have dedicated bare metal from the box that you were talking about her application, but then on average majority of the bare metal servers were completely underutilized they were not even in use obviously virtualization came in and provided suck the world and was able to provide better utilization of your underlying servers and it improve scalability of everything but at the same time as you know, there was less performance. There's more overhead of management costs, etc.

Etc. Now I think the last five years the big wave that's been coming is is Civilization of moving applications to Containers right microservices. And I think now these Cloud native applications that can run on VMS on containers onsite of anywhere.

Do you really need the hypervisor layer and at the answer is no because now you can get the same abilities and benefits of running these applications on a bare metal box and also guarantee that your application has certain resource constraints and there's not able to affect other applications. I think that's one of the main reasons we're seeing this especially now. If you know thought I remember when.

You know darker and containers kind of first burst on the scene. I guess it was seven. Six seven eight years ago, maybe something like that and one of the questions then was do you need a hypervisor on kubernetes and clearly?

Then and now the answer is no no, but the issue came up of service density. Right. That was one of the big advantages of the cloud.

Was the density that levels you could achieve? You know you talk about the applications running on a computer one of the companies that help. Put together back in the com days was called interliant.

We were an early application service provider hosting Lotus Notes. People saw loss and bunch of old Enterprise apps. Before there was Cloud before there was really big hypervisors.

And that's exactly how we did it. Now all of a sudden the hypervisor came and your server density and your application density. Your data density went through the roof right like a vertical climb the idea behind containers and then kubernetes was that that was even going to be more dense.

than the hypervisor but a lot of people said it was like multiplication you you take the density that a hypervisor environment allows you and then running. containers You know, some people said, well it was you know, exponentially more dense to be able to do that other people said it was like too negative numbers making a positive or vice versa that you would lose some of the density of kubernetes by running it on the on the whole of containers by running it on the hypervisor. What what what's your take on that?

Yeah. I mean, I think if you think today about how Enterprises run workloads, you can go to every single organization in the world and they will have a Visa deployment or they've already moved to the cloud right but I would say Legacy Enterprises all are running these here. When containers and jupernetes first came out.

It was so much easier being able to say I want to go ahead and run my actual kubernetes clusters. I'm experimenting on my existing infrastructure as opposed to talking to my it teams like I used to be and having a six-month ticket before I'm able to secure servers Etc. Obviously it was still because of containers and how they're able to bring applications with lightweight operating systems able to get a lot more utilization out of it.

It probably canceled out some of the overhead of running a hypervisor and for my perspective and I'm sure Allen you can chime in here. There is at least a seven to ten percent tax on the CPU right on memory. You don't have guaranteed iops when it comes to your actual storage desk itself, even your network throughput, you know, depending on what your other workloads or running into your Beats, which is or so being affected.

If you're going down to the bare bones of the bare metal server. You don't have you have guaranteed all the resources of the bare metal systems are dedicated to your one app or your multiple apps that are running on it. So there are obviously some benefits of all the extra containerization that go into and merge in with the V certain layer and I think that probably what counts all out but this day and age when creatures or already provides amazing abstractions for your compute for your storage for Networking.

I think it just makes sense. If you are able to run Kube on bare metal and then you also gave additional benefits. It becomes a multiplier benefit of running our bare metal and having your cognitive applications be run.

So I guess this raises the question to me who's going to tell the cloud providers this, you know, it's it's interesting that many of the cloud providers now, they're all so providing. Bare metal servers, right? I don't know if you noticed but I tried provisioning one those bare metal servers.

It was $700 like for a day. It was very very expensive. So I think well because it's not their model right?

It's really it goes against their whole scalability kind of formulas. Yeah it is it is do you and one thing I'm just Alan also considering is as kubernetes becomes the critical business infrastructure where every app will start moving towards kubernetes already the big cloud providers for the past three years are providing managed tubernetes, but the management Eddie's is of course running a VMS worker knows that you manage more and more we're seeing pushes towards Cloud run. We're seeing pushes toward fargate on Amazon where you're just defining here is my application.

You run it. Potentially I can see, you know, as you move farther into this landscape, but even the cloud providers would make it easy for you to run containerize that but they would run on physical bare metal systems and not have any virtualization tax in the middle. So certainly will be interesting now to make clear from what you and I don't pretend to be an expert inspector Cloud you I'm just going by what you told me you guys offer a hosted kubernetes.

You want to call it managed kubernetes? Is that on bare metal? Though our solution is about providing a platform.

So the organizations can run their own kubernetes. So in our case you for if you're provisioning a cluster on public Cloud, you would add your cloud account credentials and that we would essentially provision a cluster in your cloud account. Now you have an option.

Do you want to deploy the management kubernetes like eks gke or AKs or do you want us to provision on VMS? Right the traditional mechanism and when you pick the traditional mechanism, you can deploy our version of pallet kubernetes distro, or you can run k3s or micro kubernetes. So you have the option but it's always running in your environment whether it's your public Cloud environment or your data center or your average bare metal.

With your customers and what you've seen in the in the field what percentage of people would you say are organizations are running bare metal versus on hypervisor stuff. It's a great question. I think over the last year we're starting seeing a lot more push towards bare metal traditionally is always been I would say 60 70 percent on public cloud.

The rest is gonna be on vsphere or open Stock. We have a couple customers and openstack, but now we're are seeing dedicated bare metal environments in data centers that are running just because you're not easy on kubernet on bare metal the other push that we're all seeing is the new Edge initiatives right edge, of course is about having smaller either Micro Data Centers or in some cases for retail and restaurants. Just one or three small Intel nude boxes.

They're the overhead of running and hypervisor. It's just completely not not something an equation and so being able to run Cooper at is there has to be run natively. on bare metal I agree.

Do you think that that's a trend that we'll see accelerate or I I believe so because if you think about like how all today the number even though we me and you Alan talk about containers is here everyone talks about every breath it but in the Enterprise containers are only 15% adoption in production, that number will will increase to 25% in by 2025. So it's very fast linearly growing but because of that I do think that all new apps that are becoming containerize or being retrofitted to be containerized. They should all run on kubernetes and because of the values of running on bare metal as long as the management layer is easy.

I think we'll see a lot more bare metal adoption, too. When do you think you reach that sort of critical mass inflection point where that becomes the the preferred? standard model Yeah, that's a good question.

Right? So obviously right now a large Enterprises that still are using virtualization. They're using all these different services that cause provide and then of course they have kubernetes that today runs in Virtual environments and cloud or on vsphere on on premise.

I do think that as I'm assuming seventy eighty percent of the applications have become containerized Iran native with the actual Integrations kubernetes provides that more and more companies are gonna say, hey, wary investing more and more onto a hypervisor layer one that has additional cost when it has additional support and training needed when we really don't need it. I think at that point in time, we'll see majority of organizations move towards completely running bare metal whether it's on premise or their leveraging the cloud bare metal potentially using some higher level service that we talked about. Yep.

Really interesting. Of course one would say why would someone pay 61 billion dollars for hypervisor company not mentioning names. But anyway, he said we're about at a time.

This is a fascinating conversation. com or on our container Journal site, you know, it's something that we keep circling around which is this whole thing, you know, we I mean our basic belief here is that kubernetes represents kubernetes represents the heart of the new compute stack. Cloud native stack right and as this becomes the more dominant stack we're gonna see I mean, you know, it's inevitable you're gonna see more and more of it.

So anyway, thanks for coming on. com Dr. com Alrighty.

Hope to have you back soon. Keep up the great work man. Thank you for having me.

Thank you team. Alrighty, we're gonna take a break here on Tech strung. We'll be right back.