The real beauty of open source that we don’t often talk about is the fact that it not only creates software; it also creates an ecosystem of players who commercialize open source and make it sustainable; part of our lives.

Qbox (Supergiant) is one such company. I sat down with the founder of the company – Mark Brandon – at KubeCon Seattle to learn more about what they are doing.

“First and foremost, we are a support company,” said Brandon. “We provide production support, dev support training and consulting.

Supergiant is a certified service provider and has several CKAs (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) on staff.

They have created an open source toolkit for Kubernetes, under the Apache 2 license. It’s the control plane that makes it easy to deploy Kubernetes. It features smart cost-aware autoscaling that helps you increase your resource utilization so that your cloud bills can go down.

When Supergiant could have kept their sauce secret, they choose to put their code on GitHub so anyone can use it. Why? Why would they do it? Brandon explains, “We feel like we’re part of the community. We feel that it will help us build credibility for selling support contracts.”

If you have the tech talent, you can use their tool and use it, if not then you can get support from them. It’s a win-win situation without any strings attached.

“What we have done is added some sauce to Kubernetes; it’s not a secret sauce it’s a special sauce. It does things that Kubernetes doesn’t do, but it does rely on it. It’s a toolkit. It’s not a distro, it’s not a fork,” said Brandon. Supergiant supports the vanilla cloud-native distribution of Kubernetes. No vendor lock-in.”