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Pull up a chair, let me tell you a story
It’s probably no surprise to you that many of the organizations we meet with are evaluating us against a competing Kubernetes management platform. Sometimes that competing platform is Red Hat OpenShift.
As a former solution architect leader at Red Hat, now leading the SA team at Spectro Cloud, I have a unique perspective to share on how these two products — and these two companies — compare.
It’s probably fair to say that I had enough time to really get to know Red Hat inside and out. I joined in 2006, and spent nearly 18 years there within the solution architecture organization supporting both Public Sector and Commercial customers. I was a platform and infrastructure specialist supporting technologies revolving around IaaS, PaaS and DevOps. My passion and calling was to lead and build solution architecture teams. Starting in 2013 I began leading Solution Architect teams and at one point led the entire Federal pre-sales team of 50 people.
And now here I am at Spectro Cloud. Since March 2024 I’ve been managing a talented team of architects spanning North America and EMEA.
So why did I lay down the fedora and start a new journey?
Company size matters
One factor that was meaningful to me, and probably to you as a customer too, is size. Red Hat, already a large company, got even bigger after the IBM acquisition. While Red Hat’s scale offers certain advantages, smaller organizations have the flexibility to adapt and innovate more quickly. This can lead to quicker action plans and better execution for more personalized customer experiences.
So while Spectro Cloud is a maturing, growing technology company, it’s still small enough that I can be in the middle of meaningful and impactful change with the product and working on organizational challenges that span multiple teams and getting to wear different hats (not just the fedora…!). That’s the spice that I find exciting, and I know customers appreciate it too. To Spectro, every customer is a VIP, and long may that continue.
Lightning in a bottle
But as a technologist, perhaps the most important thing to me was to find a company with an awesome product that was in the right place at the right time to solve real world technology problems: catching the proverbial lightning in a bottle.
I was lucky enough to be at Red Hat at just such a moment: when I joined it had a headcount of about 2,000, and Red Hat Linux was the first major subscription-based, open-source offering with enterprise support. I got to ride a tremendous wave of growth because the product was just what the world needed.
Lightning strikes twice
At KubeCon in Chicago of 2023, I remember seeing my first demo of the Spectro Cloud product called Palette.
I can recall the joy and excitement of the Solution Architects and sales folks explaining the ease of use and the problems that the Palette platform was able to solve.
Without geeking out too much, getting to hear and see how Spectro Cloud's unique CAPI provider architecture scaled to improve performance and reliability sounded terrific, and that’s before you even get into topics like edge computing.
This was the type of product I had been looking for to capture that lightning again.
Kubernetes is all about choice
To really understand why Palette is so special, it’s important to put this ‘lightning in a bottle’ moment in context.
Kubernetes is highly adaptable and extensible by design. Its value stems from the huge ecosystem around it, which starts in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) itself. There are almost 200 CNCF projects with over 200,000 contributors across 190 countries, which gives customers so much choice of the right technologies to fit their workloads, their environments, and their use cases.
It’s not unusual for organizations to already be using multiple distributions of Kubernetes, and multiple versions, across a couple of clouds and on-prem or edge locations. Spectro Cloud doesn’t lock you into one distribution of Kubernetes and tooling.
And we’re just getting started. As organizations begin to explore all of the different use cases where Kubernetes and cloud native applications can help, we will see another explosion of growth and diversity.
Where Spectro Cloud shines is giving enterprises unfettered access to that ecosystem diversity, without compromising security or control.
Kubernetes the way you want it
Palette supports most any CNCF Kubernetes distribution, multiple different operating systems, dozens and dozens of software integrations up the stack, and dozens of different environments too — from cloud, to virtualized and bare metal data centers, to the edge.
It provides consistent governance and automation across all of that diversity, simplifying Day 0, 1 and 2 lifecycle management no matter how many clusters you need to run.
Over the past ten years of my career with Kubernetes, I’ve learned that it’s this unique combination of choice and control that Palette offers that customers are looking for.
Compare that to Red Hat OpenShift. It’s a great product, a highly mature cloud-based platform that helps developers build and deploy applications at scale. And, to give credit where credit is due, Red Hat still contributes back extensively to the open source community and to CNCF projects directly.
But, few would say that OpenShift is easy to implement or manage on your own (believe me, our teams heard the challenges every day). OpenShift is a premium product which comes with cost and complexity. And it is highly opinionated: it locks you into the Red Hat way with additional Red Hat products, limiting some of the choice and openness that the upstream CNCF ecosystem provides.
I could go on — into areas like bare metal, or edge — but this is the essential difference between the two platforms, and it’s what made the decision for me as a technologist. It may help you make your decision, too.
Working with the best
Leaving the technology aside, I wanted to make sure that the company I chose was customer centric, that truly valued engineering excellence, that valued its employees and its partners. In addition to my pre-sales team we have a great Customer Success organization that is focused on day to day problem resolution as well as post-sales customer care and support. Obviously we want new customers, but keeping our existing customers happy is very important to all of us.
For me, the pursuit of excellence is required. I believe it’s okay to make mistakes, as long as you’re not making the same ones — we should try to improve and learn something each day. It’s okay to not have all the answers as long as you try to find the answers, and if you share what you learned with others, all the better!
In order to be successful in my new role, I needed to know that my style of leadership and communication would fit with Spectro, and that we would share similar beliefs. In my conversations during my hiring process, and the months since, I know I found the right place.
Meet my world-class team
Today I’m privileged to manage a great bunch of architects with lots of talent and experience, and my mission is to create a world class Solution Architecture team that supports our customers and partners (by the way, I’m always looking for superstars to join the team, so don’t be shy about getting in touch). At the same time, I’m trying to foster a culture of continuous learning, self and situational awareness and having fun while doing it! Work should be hard and fun at the same time if you’re doing it correctly.
So why not put me and my team to the test? Come and meet us at one of our upcoming events, chat to our engineers, and maybe you can get the same demo that wowed me back at KubeCon in Chicago. Like I said — lightning in a bottle.
