In today’s decentralized IT world, on-premises applications are seeming more of a hassle than they’re worth for some organizations, sparking a shift to the containerization of applications instead. We had the opportunity to speak with the CEO and founder of Replicated to learn how their product is helping organizations deploy multi-prem apps in K8s 4 times faster than they would traditionally.
The Slow Death of On-Premises Applications
Although some have been ringing the bell for years, following the decentralization of IT due to WFH and the COVID-19 pandemic, on-premises software seems to be on its last legs. With employees working from anywhere, connecting back to on-prem applications creates sources of friction that many organizations are finding to be more of an anchor than a sail.
Despite this apparent decline, enterprises still spent upwards of $400B on on-prem software in 2020, proving that, amidst the friction, on-prem software remains lucrative. Given the general rise of containerization through Kubernetes, one can only wonder when we’ll start seeing the containerization of applications usually hosted on-prem as well.
“Multi-Prem” Application Delivery through Kubernetes
For Replicated, the future of operational, Kubernetes-driven app delivery is now. Their Kubernetes Off-the-Shelf (KOTS) software enables developers to operationalize their various customer environments entirely from Kubernetes clusters. That way, instead of funneling data from the edge back to apps hosted on-prem, IT teams can deploy their applications directly at the edge itself, allowing them to streamline both app performance and rollout simultaneously.
In practice, Replicated can be used in two core fashions: release channeling & licensing entitlement and supportability. The first use case, release channeling & licensing entitlement, relies on GitOps and dozens of other integrations to enable auto-committing of releases, helping devs to roll out their application updates automatically. Due to its open-sourced nature, Replicated has created a knowledge library of troubleshooting and Kubernetes best practices to help their customers optimize their deployments as well.
Replicated: Helping Customers Install 4x Faster
Recently, we here at Gestalt IT had the opportunity to sit down with Replicated’s CEO and founder, Grant Miller, to discuss the product and its overall fit in the enterprise IT industry as a whole. During that presentation, Miller shared a very intriguing statistic with us.
As you can see in the charts above, the majority of Replicated customers take fewer than 7 days to install their app in K8s. Compared to information gathered from the rest of the industry, Replicated provides an incredible 4 times improvement to install times.
The graphic above shows how Replicated is uniquely suited to improve customers’ time to live. Comparing that to the use cases detailed in the previous section, you can start to see why Replicated is quickly becoming a big player in the app deployment space.
Zach’s Reaction
To close off, I’d like to share a quote from Miller that I feel encapsulates Replicated’s position towards the market:
All of enterprise software is just a part of a greater whole, so integration is key.
Such a sentiment resonates so well with the way we view things here at Gestalt IT, and given that Replicated just completed an $82M Series C, it seems that other leaders in the space agree with us both.
Thanks again to Grant Miller and Sara Dornsife from Replicated for speaking with us, as well as our good pal Forrest Carman for setting up the conversation. Learn more about Replicated by visiting their website.
