Devtron Labs began life with the mission of democratising Kubernetes, and to help cloud-native companies traverse its complexities by giving developers and operational staff an easy-to-use graphical platform to work with. The product is now in use across open-source and commercial customers including Delivery, Bharat Pe, Moglix, Liv Space, and XoXo Day.

iTWire spoke with Rajesh Razdan, co-founder, Devtron Labs, to understand how the company is helping organisations of all sizes solve their container orchestration needs.

Razdan explained the Devtron team is passionate about Kubernetes, and rightly so; it’s a unique container orchestration software and one of the top open-source projects of all time. Kubernetes is the first Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project donated by Google, and the software presents a plethora of solutions for those looking to set up their cloud infrastructures.

Kubernetes offers improved resource utilisation across the tech stack, shortened software development cycles, containerised monolithic applications, reduced cloud costs, and more.

Yet, the container ecosystem evolves rapidly and businesses must stay updated and ready to tackle large-scale business challenges as well. It’s a tool meant for scale and meant for automation, but as such is complex to debug and learn, and particularly to do so well, with security built-in at all stages.

This is where Devtron brings an advantage to your business. The product is built with deep integration with popular open-source tools, comes with a simple user interface, and ensures security, stability, and cost optimisation at all points.

"We cater to our customers and users to help them achieve their digital transformation goals and accelerate the release velocity of their applications,” Razdan said.

This customer care is at the heart of Devtron's DNA. The desire to radically simplify Kubernetes management at scale, and with inherent security, comes from a passion for AppOps, which Razdan describes as an app-centric portion of DevOps. “At Devtron, we classify AppOps as a means to handle application operations, management, and operation.”

"It is not an unknown fact that innovation in the field of app development and delivery has been progressing at rocket speed in the last few years. After the advent of microservices entered containers, simplifying the packaging of microservices, and then came Kubernetes, which revolutionised the way container applications are deployed, orchestrated, and managed. While all these solutions helped boost digital transformation globally, they also brought in higher levels of complexities for developers and IT professionals. While the traditional view of DevOps is supremely efficient, we need to take a look at a specific portion of DevOps as a separate entity — AppOps,” he said.

Devtron's platform is built for developers and DevOps alike, constructed with industry best-practice Git principles.

"We assist our customers and partners by helping them take the complexity out of learning Kubernetes. We get the users on a simple UX to manage applications and microservices such as debugging, chart management, auto-scanning of container images, on-demand previews, off-peak scale down/deletion, inbuilt deployment strategies to just name a few. The whole platform is built on GitOps with benchmarks in place and best practices using the best-of-the-breed open source tools with single pane simplicity in mind so that a first-time user relates with the platform just as one starts using it,” Razdan said.

Any company, large or small, can benefit from working with Devtron - whether kickstarting or strengthening their digital transformation journey.

Kubernetes is inherently designed to handle complex application scenarios and is built for growth and scale, and companies embarking on their journey to Kubernetes can benefit from a much simplified onboarding process through Devtron. The platform provides simple and efficient continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) management. It prioritises system stability and security, and “most importantly, ensures that cost is in check,” Razdan said.

If your company is struggling to join the digital bandwagon because your adoption of cloud-native technologies is a huge transformation instead of an incremental change, or even if you’re there but looking for a simpler, smarter way then Devtron has you covered. “We provide relevant solutions at multiple levels, including setting up a simple dashboard to configure and manage all tools in a very easy-to-use environment with a focus on accessibility among multiple users. The pipeline manages itself by decentralising various functions within the deployment guardrails and finally embedding it with industry-first hierarchical security features and compliances,” Razdan said.

There's a lot more to come; "I like to believe that the Devtron journey has just begun,” Razdan said. “While we have achieved significant milestones since inception, we plan to grow the business and our adoption boundlessly in the next couple of years. This year, we would like to scale up our user base internationally among the developers and DevOps practitioners. In line with this, we will be making an array of contributions to the open-source community by bringing solutions for globally relevant use cases such as simplifying Helm by bringing in visual handling experiences. Given that multiple global deployments continue to take place via Helm, increased simplification on deployment pipelines increased integrations with tools, etc will be our primary focus. We will also be dedicating efforts to deepen Devtron’s security features and compliances for optimal user experience.”

The great news too is there's no barrier to adoption. Devtron is completely open-source! “All Devtron features are available to our open-source users and there is strictly no paywall that separates them from our paid customers,” Razdan said.

You can check out the GitHub repo for yourself.

"We have seen that potential users generally discover us on various tech channels and social tech community platforms, and subsequently arrive at our repo. There is adequate learning material and use cases, both literature and videos, available on our platforms for consumption. In addition to this, our team is heavily active on the Discord channel that continuously strives to help users get on board on Devtron,” Razdan said.

Commercial Devtron customers have a dedicated, managed service level agreement (SLA) based on their needs and contracts. Yet, once a priority feature is rolled to a paid user, it is simultaneously released for the open-source community as well.

With such ease of access, there's no reason not to explore Devtron - and plenty of reasons to do so right now.

If you're an entrenched Kubernetes environment you can benefit from Devtron’s best practices, and how it simplifies deployment, security, and cost control at scale.

If you're early in your adoption of Kubernetes then you have the great opportunity of taking up Devtron as a default software delivery platform for your applications.

"We recommend deploying Devtron for the entire lifecycle of applications to make the most of the benefits available to them,” Razdan said. “The features specifically target the simple adoption of Kubernetes with an increased focus on debugging and integration with External applications in their cloud-native journey. Devtron also provides us and the users an opportunity to contribute to the development of future releases and features.”

"At the end of the day, it's open-source and thereby encourages co-learning and sharing opportunities amongst all,” Razdan said.

See it in action here: