Mirantis has announced the acquisition of amazee.io, the ZeroOps application delivery hub built by developers for developers. amazee.io is the creator of the open source project Lagoon, an application delivery platform that helps developers deploy, manage and secure applications on any Kubernetes cluster with complete ease. In this episode of TFiR Newsroom, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Adrian Ionel, Co-Founder and CEO of Mirantis and Michael Schmid, Chief Technology Officer of amazee.io, to learn more about the acquisition and how it fits perfectly into Mirantis’ ZeroOps strategy.

Ionel and Schmid go into depth about the key challenges companies are facing and how they are helping to simplify cloud-native infrastructure for them, helping them reduce costs.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• amazee.io is an application delivery service helping customers to deploy their application in a simple, secure manner into all the kinds of Kubernetes clusters around the world. The company is particularly developer-centric. Schmid introduces the company and explains about their open source tool, Lagoon.
• Ionel goes into detail about their mission to free development teams from operations, integration, and infrastructure management work so they can focus on developing features and capabilities. He discusses the roadmap for Mirantis and how amazee.io fits well into their ZeroOps vision.
• Mirantis is an established company having originally catered for very technological advanced customers like PayPal and Cisco. However, over time they have evolved to over 700 customers across all industries. Ionel explains the two obstacles their customers are facing: tech complexity and talent scarcity and how Mirantis is helping solve these problems.
• Ionel likens the cloud to an IKEA’s shopping experience whereby you think you buy furniture but instead you come back with a week’s worth of projects, working out how to put everything together. He believes that it is a similar experience on the hyperscalers where you get lost in the complexity which can lead to stalled projects.
• Cost in the cloud can be incredibly complex to manage but as Ionel explains the cost of development expenses of software development teams is far larger than the expense of the underlying infrastructure. He goes on to explain the cost reduction amazee.io and Mirantis’ customers will see with automated application delivery and the cost savings they can make also in the infrastructure itself.
• Schmid shares the evolution they have seen with their customers who used to originally only use one type of application to build their services but now are using microservices architecture. He discusses the challenges they are experiencing and how their company helps by unifying all the different stacks into one, which is based on top of Kubernetes.
• Schmid explains their key focus lies with scaling Lagoon, and providing a standard on one specific platform like with Kubernetes. He goes into depth about the company’s focus and how this will help them service their customers better.
• Mirantis delivers ZeroOps for cloud-native platforms for the core infrastructure, while Lagoon and amazee.io are focused on the layer on top. Ionel explains why this fits in perfectly and synergy of alignment on technical vision as to where the platform needs to go and how it can add immediate value to their customers.
• Ionel takes Swapnil through the thought process of Mirantis, from Lens IDE and now the acquisition of amazee.io discussing the common thread that holds these ideas together, such as making it as easy as possible for developers anywhere to create, ship, and run their most valuable code. He goes into the benefits of Lens for their customers and what their plan is for the future.
• Lagoon will stay completely open source, something amazee.io is passionate about. Schmid explains why he feels open source helps developers better understand things and why he thinks Lagoon needs to be built by the community for the community, discussing how Lagoon will be maintained by the community.

Connect with Adrian Ionel (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Connect with Michael Schmid (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Learn more about Mirantis (Twitter)
Learn more about amazee.io (Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.