Analysts do love themselves a wide feature matrix. The more checkboxes a Kubernetes Management Platform ticks in one of those pay-to-play “capabilities” scorecards, the higher it climbs. A million and one features, all bundled, all “included”, all scored as strengths.
When did “does everything” become the definition of “good”?
That is not “good”. That is a bill for stuff you will likely never use!
The picture above is the market as it actually sits today. Two well-populated ends, and an empty middle.
On the left, CNCF DIY. Your internal teams (or a highly paid consultant) stitch twenty or thirty discrete OSS tools together, and call it a platform. Zero license costs, enormous people/support cost, no fun when something breaks or needs upgrading.
On the right, a pre-bundled version of the exact same thing. Red Hat, Nutanix, VMware, AWS, and most of the rest of the market. They take those same twenty or thirty CNCF tools, wire them together, put a fancy UI over the top, staple a support contract on the front, and sell it as a platform. You are buying a support contract wrapped around somebody else’s assembly job, and paying to run every tool in the bundle whether you use it or not.
Same complexity. Different invoice.
Why oh why is there nothing in the middle. No goldilocks product. No “just enough of what you need, and nothing else”. Which is a shame, because that is what most teams actually need.
If only the analysts rewarded “Fit” and not “Features” as their gauge of “good”, then maybe, just maybe, the market would stop over-investing in technology that sits idle 99% of the time.
Here at Portainer, we are a bit rogue… we don’t follow the norm, and we love to do things differently. We PURPOSELY built the product to sit in that unaddressed middle. One genuine tool with a lot of inbuilt capability, not a dozen OSS projects dressed up as our own. Lean, focused, and priced appropriately for what you actually use.
If our “crazy” approach is one that appeals to you, come have a chat with us. We dare to be different.
Neil