AFRICA
REGIONAL
CHANNELS
AFRICA
Obsidian Systems and Rancher
Labs have joined together in a
strategic partnership to help Africa
take advantage of the benefits
that Kubernetes brings. Using
Kubernetes, a business can get
its entire infrastructure up and
running within minutes.
OBSIDIAN, RANCHER
TO DRIVE KUBERNETES IN AFRICA
Obsidian Systems, a supplier of
enterprise-ready open source
software solutions, has entered
into a strategic partnership with
Rancher Labs, a cloud-native start-up that
delivers Kubernetes-as-a-Service across
any infrastructure.
Even though other cloud vendors provide
Kubernetes-as-a-Service, Rancher is the
only organisation that is completely agnostic
to enable a business to run Kubernetes in
any way that is required. For example, the
company can use multiple cloud-hosted
Kubernetes offerings from a single Rancher
and can still tie the authentication back to a
single source. This means there is no need to
use different identities when using multiple
cloud environments.
Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems
Chris Urwin, VP of Field Engineering at Rancher Labs
With the combination of Kubernetes and
Ranchers’ infrastructure-agnostic approach,
this facilitates rapid migration between
different infrastructure providers without a
high cost of change.
Businesses across Africa can now
run their applications in one place and if
another major cloud provider enters the
market with significant cost changes or
better performance, they can easily take
advantage of this.
“Given the unique connectivity and
power challenges on the continent,
Rancher provides us with resilient
workloads that span multiple date
centres for the best possible redundancy.
This offering is our preferred way of
delivering modern applications to our
customers,” said Muggie van Staden, MD
of Obsidian Systems.
“Rancher will continue to innovate in
the Kubernetes space and look to drive
adoption, utilising partners such as Obsidian
Systems to give that local on-the-ground
presence and market knowledge to help
Africa take advantage of the benefits that
Kubernetes brings,” said Chris Urwin, VP of
Field Engineering at Rancher Labs.
Kubernetes is revolutionary in the way
that it fundamentally changes the way
that applications are developed, deployed,
monitored and secured. Using Kubernetes, a
business can get its entire infrastructure up
and running within minutes.
“The partnership with Rancher makes a
lot of strategic sense for us. It is a market
leader and committed to open source and
open standards. Virtual machines have
become bulky and take up a lot of storage.
With Rancher and Kubernetes, a company
becomes more agile and can get systems
in place within milliseconds. It makes the
entire administration process so much
easier and is such an elegant technology.
And even though companies across all
industry sectors can benefit from this,
we anticipate the initial growth to come
from those in the financial services market
looking for a secure, robust and reliable
offering that equips them for the digital
world,” added van Staden. •
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