Reflections on the K8S market and on Rancher Labs

Amsterdam, June 21, 2019 - Almost 3 months in the job - some reflections on the market and on Rancher Labs

My name is Jeroen Overmaat and I am the Regional Director for Rancher Labs, covering Benelux and Nordics. I worked for Puppet before (Configuration Automation) and before that, I worked for VMware (Virtualization and Cloud Automation).

Why did I change careers?

It was hard to decide to let go of my previous employer and to leave the Infrastructure-As-Code market in which I made my mark for the Benelux and Nordic region. Huge enterprises like Nordea, Swedbank, Aegon, KPN, Booking.com, De Volksbank (to name a few) all automated how they managed on-premises servers without repeating the same tasks over and over again to improve their productivity and create consistency over their infrastructure. This week, I met my former inside sales and he told me that these customers are currently expanding, which means that they made a good choice. 

When I was evaluating the market and reviewing possible future employers, I looked into companies that operated in the field of AI, Big Data, DevOps and Cloud. I talked to and interviewed with i.e. OutSystems, CloudBees, DataDog, SignalFx, Attunity, GitLab and even Microsoft. All with an interesting portfolio, job role or salary package. Then came along Rancher Labs. During my evaluation, it became clear that containers and Kubernetes were going to change how applications are built, deployed, and managed. What I learned at Puppet is that every company is a software company. Every company is building software, one way or the other. Rancher Labs would give me the opportunity to be part of that market.

Market potential

In July, I will be 3 months in the job. In that short period, I was able to sign up a large financial institute in Iceland, as well as a mid-sized Norwegian customer. We have built a healthy pipeline for the following quarters with some serious enterprise size deals. My new colleagues who joined in April as well, are all experiencing the same: the enterprise market is ready. All new colleagues have also onboarded new logos in DACH, SEMEA, UK&I. Kubernetes has become the project to turn to if you need container orchestration at scale. Kubernetes is well-regarded, well-supported, and evolving fast. I believe, Rancher Labs is offering a true solution for a problem here: Kubernetes is just sprawling, complex, and difficult to set up and configure. Not only that, but much of the heavy lifting is left to the end user. The best approach, therefore, isn’t to grab the bits and try to go it alone but to seek out a complete container solution that includes Kubernetes as a supported, maintained component.

Testing the market potential

I figured the best way to test the market is to organise an event, right in the beginning of my career. I was able to group Microsoft, GitHub and Aqua to join us in a free event. Initially, I thought that if we get anywhere between 50 and 100 registrations, I would be a happy guy. We were 'sold out' within three weeks... Due to high demand, we had to move the venue to a larger location to be able to host 200 guests. We will repeat this event in various cities in my region, but also outside of my region (Paris, London, Berlin).

Getting scared

During KubeCon Barcelona, I witnessed almost 8,000 people whom all had a massive interested in Kubernetes. To be very honest here: there was a point where I got a bit scared: at times delegates were 10 deep at the booth and they were kind of pushing against the booth to learn more about Rancher and that three days in a row. I kid you not.

What am I selling?

Between clusters running in different clouds, data centers, and the edge, it is almost certain that my network of customers will be running more than one Kubernetes cluster. I am guessing that these folks will have a hard time building a custom Kubernetes cluster while also helping the dev teams with their pipelines, monitoring, application debugging and all of the other day to day tasks. It's also hard to hire people with in-depth Kubernetes skills. Looking for a paid support contract from a vendor who has packaged up Kubernetes to make it simple to install and operate, who can also jump in when you have an outage to help diagnose and recover AND (and here’s the secret sauce): does full stack support of the entire enterprise Kubernetes ecosystem of vendors delivering value.

I told you that a large financial institute in Iceland signed up for our Enterprise Subscription contract. This is a quote from their Enterprise Architect, that explains very well why customers are choosing to work with Rancher:

"Rancher was chosen mostly for a couple of reasons. First and foremost – Rancher is much simpler than other products we looked at. It has the needed access controls for an Enterprise deployment and fits our use case perfectly. Second – Rancher is open source and we loved the fact that the open source version is THE version... there are no paid features – the business model is around supporting the customers – not grabbing more money just by adding a new feature that needs an extra license. It also fits well with our cloud strategy since it supports both on-premise deployments as well as managed deployments in Azure/Amazon/Google Cloud.

Simplicity is key here!"

What is it like to work for Rancher, you may ask? Rancher is legitimately a great product and it is 100% open source. It is my understanding that Rancher is extremely friendly to developers, admins and non-technical folks alike. And, what I have seen during my new hire in Cupertino and over the past few weeks: Rancher Labs has serious folks maintaining the product and contributing back to Kubernetes upstream. Every customer-facing call we have, my colleagues surprised me positively with their professionalism and enthusiasm. Yeah, you know being a start-up means not everything is baked in a corporate process here at Rancher Labs, but the good thing is: one can truly contribute and create a process that works for all of the Rancher Labs peeps.

It's a crazy landscape out there and growing/changing almost daily. Currently, our customers are starting to move business-critical workloads into production. They are at the phase where they need to run containers in any infrastructure. They are wondering how to cope with overlay networking, load balancing, metadata services. Really, all the things you kind of need to bootstrap container applications. This is where Rancher is a natural fit. Rancher Labs itself is a true 'roll up your sleeves" experience and you'll need to guide the market to maturity. To be completely fair: it requires hard work and long hours to keep up with the enormous demand, but hey... this is what building a business feels like! We don't have customers, we have fans. 

Two days ago, Rancher Labs hosted a conference in China: 900+ attendees in person and 10,000+ people joined the event via video streaming. Crazy.

We are still looking for 2 superstars to join us in Europe. If you are a technical presales consultant/field engineer with Kubernetes experience in the Netherlands and/or in the Nordics, or a new business sales professional in Germany: come talk to us! I am at [email protected]. We give you the opportunity to build a great company in one of the hottest markets in IT.

Kubernetes is not a flash in the pan - it is here to stay - and its prevalence is likely to expand dramatically as software complexity moves to more and more parts of the enterprise.

Background information: In the world of Kubernetes, Jeroen Overmaat joined Rancher in April 2019 as Regional Director Benelux & Nordics. Previously, Jeroen gained his DevOps experience via Puppet which is the leading Continuous Configuration Automation platform in the industry. Prior to Puppet, Jeroen was a senior Strategic Account Executive serving strategic customers for VMware in Finance, Insurance, Telco and Service Provider markets. Jeroen is passionate about driving change in the way companies should use and re-think their current and future IT strategy to drive 'software defined'. 

Rancher deploys Kubernetes clusters anywhere, on any provider and it unites them under centralized authentication and access control. Builders want to build, not manage clusters.