Replicated Use Cases - Install Faster
Hello!
Welcome to the next video in the series where we're talking about use cases to solve common challenges for ISVs and serving commercial products to their customers. We've talked about the software distribution lifecycle - how we help you build better, test, secure everything, sell more, install faster, support efficiently, and measure what matters.
Today, let's really focus on the install piece of it - this is really important. A lot of people think Helm is the answer to everything, but Helm alone is not enough. Let's talk about why.
If we're trying to install faster, what does that mean? We want to complete POCs and production deployments in less time, with less cost so you can get your solution engineers and architects off and running and doing other things.
This is a real issue. Dimensional research in a study found 84 percent of independent software vendors took a week or longer to install and configure software in customers’ self managed Kubernetes environments. 93 percent of the companies had to do POCs to sell their software. So this is a real pain, and it takes a lot of time. Customers are demanding it, though. What to do?
Oftentimes the delay is because the customer doesn't have a Kubernetes cluster ready to go. How do we help? If you're waiting for the customer to put together all the pieces of Kubernetes, and Helm, and add-ons, and which distribution and which environment are they running in - obviously that's slowing things down. They may not even know what they need.
We help package together Helm, your application, and Kubernetes and spin up a new cluster on demand. You can install that app directly into it so you can shorten your time to live for POCs and production deployments. If you don't want to use Helm, no problem.
If the customer already has Kubernetes, cool, but we can help either way. We’ll help to make it faster, easier, and put it together programmatically so that it'll install successfully.
I talked about how Helm isn't sufficient. Helm is a great tool, but Helm really focuses on that install piece of software distribution. There's a lot of things Helm doesn't do. It doesn't do any release management, license entitlement, pre-flight checks of the environment, and doesn't report back a lot of telemetry. It doesn't really handle backup and restore at a complete level. While Helm helps with basic installs and config, it doesn't address all the other common needs for apps in customer-managed environments.
We take Helm and we complement it. We add in these other capabilities, pre-flight checks, and create a Kubernetes cluster for it, giving you a rich GUI (if you want that). We provide troubleshooting, diagnostics, detailed reporting, all these other things that really help you manage the customer and manage the application of the customer environment.
Let's say you're having a problem with success rate. You're distributing to diverse environments, so there's probably a high likelihood of failures and a lot of troubleshooting. Your customers have to start again and again, and it may not be just over the course of the afternoon. It may be over days or longer.
We really help abstract that app install for the complexity and the variability of customer environments. Impress your customers, move opportunities and projects forwards faster, and get going the first time, every time.
If you are having difficult installs, then you're spending a lot of engineering time helping those field engineers. Then, the developers need to step-in because the field team can't solve the issue. That's taking those developers away from innovation, and it's upsetting their schedules. We often hear from companies that 50 percent of their time can be spent supporting customer issues versus developing new capabilities. What we want to do here is give you a feature rich installer out of the box, whether or not that's Helm based, and check that environments are meeting your requirements.
You can focus on developing new features and you know it's going to install successfully. You'll have tested for each one of these customer representative environments up front, and that's going to reduce the engineering pain down the road.
What if your field staff in your customer teams don't have quite enough Kubernetes skills in them? Although it's adopting rapidly, there are still questions out there and a lot of people don't feel super comfortable, so your odds of success are going to be low if you require everybody to be a truly expert level K8s administrator. We want to automate the installs and have a simple cut and paste command that's going to spin up new clusters. It's going to install the application into it, and it’s going to leverage Helm charts. It's not going to require any particular expertise, so you can enable more self service installs. You don't need to handhold through every one of them, and you're able to avoid mistakes along the way.
We can also help you distribute to many flavors of Kubernetes operating systems and clouds. You don't have to have a unique installer for everyone - you can have one common platform that handles all of this and combines all the components, including Helm, so you focus on innovation. You're now not spending a lot of engineering time inventing and maintaining this installer forever, always trying to update it for new versions. Let us take care of that for you!
These are all ways we can help you install faster and take that burden off your team. Thanks for reading!