Plural’s platform allows enterprises to manage their Kubernetes clusters in one place
When Sam Weaver Vice President Product Management was at WeedsHe realized that the company needed a better way to manage its vast network of Kubernetes clusters – those groups of computer nodes. When Unqork could not find anything off the shelf, it assembled a team of 15 people to build a Kubernetes management product. Despite the costs of several millions of dollars, Weaver said that the resulting platform was just good.
“I think to myself, there must be a better way to do this,” Weaver told WAN. “I mean, what we had built was enough, but it was absolutely not complete, and it took us about two years to do the build.”
Weaver (shown above) was the idea until he met Michael Guarino, an engineer with remarkable stints at companies such as Amazon and Twitter – when it was still called. When Weaver explained the problem to Guarino, he was surprised by his reaction: Guarino thought the problem was relatively easy to solve. Guarino then only built a better system in a few weeks.
That platform became the basis for Plural. The company’s platform consolidates the Kubernetes clusters of an enterprise in one dashboard to make it easier for companies to streamline operations, manage these clusters and implement upgrades from one central location.
The AI of plural can also give suggestions about optimizing cluster efficiency or diagnosing scale problems, Weaver said. Multural is Cloud and LLM Agnostic.
Weaver said that the hope is that plural time free up for developers because they don’t have to look for information or bugs in their Kubernetes clusters. He added that the company can help teams to perform updates in hours in contrast to weeks.
“It reduces the operational overhead by around 90% is what we have seen with our users and customers,” said Weaver. “People are really enthusiastic about that because they are actually able to do productive work.”
Weaver said the timing for this solution is good. In recent years, companies from managing one Kubernetes cluster to several – accelerated a trend by the rise of AI.
“You have a lot of cattle running around that you can no longer only treat as individual clusters,” said Weaver. “So so far, people have taken a lot of open-source tooling from the ecosystem. There are 2,000 projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem.”
Multiple was founded in 2021 and shortly thereafter launched the original version of his platform. The company now works with several company customers, in markets such as financial services and other regulated industries, according to Weaver, although he refused to announce specific customer names or figures.
The startup recently collected a seed round of $ 6 million under the leadership of primary venture partners with the participation of Capital One Ventures and Company Ventures. Weaver said the team was on its way to pick up $ 3 million, but in the end his round doubled after seeing a strong question. The company wants to place the money to deepen its product options and ultimately explore areas outside Kubernetes.
Multiple is not only in tackling Kubernetes -ClusterSprawl. Competitors include Loft Labs, a startup that has collected $ 28.6 million in venture financing, and Rancher Labs, a startup that $ 95 million collected before he was taken over by Suse in 2020 for $ 600 million.
Weaver thinks that the largest distinctive factor of plural is the architecture. He specifically mentioned the fact that plural runs on a gitops model, the product is hosted by every customer himself and that every Kubernetes cluster has its own AI agent who runs on top.
“The company actually has complete control over how and where they implement this thing,” said Weaver. “No data is sent home. It is not a SaaS service. We are on our way, we are aimed at adding the Kubernetes management platform that we have, and there are still a lot to do about what we are enthusiastic about.”
