Earlier this year, Mirantis, the company that now owns Docker’s enterprise business, acquired Lens, a desktop application that provides developers with something akin to an IDE for managing their Kubernetes clusters. At the time, Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel told me that the company wants to offer enterprises the tools to quickly build modern applications. Today, it’s taking another step in that direction with the launch of an extensions API for Lens that will take the tool far beyond its original capabilities.

In addition to this update to Lens, Mirantis also today announced a new open-source project: k0s. The company describes it as “a modern, 100% upstream vanilla Kubernetes distro that is designed and packaged without compromise.”

It’s a single optimized binary without any OS dependencies (besides the kernel). Based on upstream Kubernetes, k0s supports Intel and Arm architectures and can run on any Linux host or Windows Server 2019 worker nodes. Given these requirements, the team argues that k0s should work for virtually any use case, ranging from local development clusters to private data centers, telco clusters and hybrid cloud solutions.

“We wanted to create a modern, robust and versatile base layer for various use cases where Kubernetes is in play. Something that leverages vanilla upstream Kubernetes and is versatile enough to cover use cases ranging from typical cloud based deployments to various edge/IoT type of cases,” said Jussi Nummelin, senior principal engineer at Mirantis and founder of k0s. “Leveraging our previous experiences, we really did not want to start maintaining the setup and packaging for various OS distros. Hence the packaging model of a single binary to allow us to focus more on the core problem rather than different flavors of packaging such as debs, rpms and what-nots.”

Mirantis, of course, has a bit of experience in the distro game. In its earliest iteration, back in 2013, the company offered one of the first major OpenStack distributions, after all.

Image Credits: Mirantis

As for Lens, the new API, which will go live next week to coincide with KubeCon, will enable developers to extend the service with support for other Kubernetes-integrated components and services.

“Extensions API will unlock collaboration with technology vendors and transform Lens into a fully featured cloud native development IDE that we can extend and enhance without limits,” said Miska Kaipiainen, the co-founder of the Lens open-source project and senior director of engineering at Mirantis. “If you are a vendor, Lens will provide the best channel to reach tens of thousands of active Kubernetes developers and gain distribution to your technology in a way that did not exist before. At the same time, the users of Lens enjoy quality features, technologies and integrations easier than ever.”

The company has already lined up a number of popular CNCF projects and vendors in the cloud-native ecosystem to build integrations. These include Kubernetes security vendors Aqua and Carbonetes, API gateway maker Ambassador Labs and AIOps company Carbon Relay. Venafi, nCipher, Tigera, Kong and StackRox are also currently working on their extensions.

“Introducing an extensions API to Lens is a game-changer for Kubernetes operators and developers, because it will foster an ecosystem of cloud-native tools that can be used in context with the full power of Kubernetes controls, at the user’s fingertips,” said Viswajith Venugopal, StackRox software engineer and developer of KubeLinter. “We look forward to integrating KubeLinter with Lens for a more seamless user experience.”

AI and data analytics company Databricks today announced the launch of SQL Analytics, a new service that makes it easier for data analysts to run their standard SQL queries directly on data lakes. And with that, enterprises can now easily connect their business intelligence tools like Tableau and Microsoft’s Power BI to these data repositories as well.

SQL Analytics will be available in public preview on November 18.

In many ways, SQL Analytics is the product Databricks has long been looking to build and that brings its concept of a ‘lake house’ to life. It combines the performance of a data warehouse, where you store data after it has already been transformed and cleaned, with a data lake, where you store all of your data in its raw form. The data in the data lake, a concept that Databrick’s co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi has long championed, is typically only transformed when it gets used. That makes data lakes cheaper, but also a bit harder to handle for users.

Image Credits: Databricks

“We’ve been saying Unified Data Analytics, which means unify the data with the analytics. So data processing and analytics, those two should be merged. But no one picked that up,” Ghodsi told me. But ‘lake house’ caught on as a term.

“Databricks has always offered data science, machine learning. We’ve talked about that for years. And with Spark, we provide the data processing capability. You can do [extract, transform, load]. That has always been possible. SQL Analytics enables you to now do the data warehousing workloads directly, and concretely, the business intelligence and reporting workloads, directly on the data lake.”

The general idea here is that with just one copy of the data, you can enable both traditional data analyst use cases (think BI) and the data science workloads (think AI) Databricks was already known for. Ideally, that makes both use cases cheaper and simpler.

The service sits on top of an optimized version of Databricks’ open-source Delta Lake storage layer to enable the service to quickly complete queries. In addition, Delta Lake also provides auto-scaling endpoints to keep the query latency consistent, even under high loads.

While data analysts can query these data sets directly, using standard SQL, the company also built a set of connectors to BI tools. Its BI partners include Tableau, Qlik, Looker and Thoughtspot, as well as ingest partners like Fivetran, Fishtown Analytics, Talend and Matillion.

Image Credits: Databricks

“Now more than ever, organizations need a data strategy that enables speed and agility to be adaptable,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau. “As organizations are rapidly moving their data to the cloud, we’re seeing growing interest in doing analytics on the data lake. The introduction of SQL Analytics delivers an entirely new experience for customers to tap into insights from massive volumes of data with the performance, reliability and scale they need.”

In a demo, Ghodsi showed me what the new SQL Analytics workspace looks like. It’s essentially a stripped-down version of the standard code-heavy experience that Databricks users are familiar with. Unsurprisingly, SQL Analytics provides a more graphical experience that focuses more on visualizations and not Python code.

While there are already some data analysts on the Databricks platform, this obviously opens up a large new market for the company — something that would surely bolster its plans for an IPO next year.

Solo.io, a Cambridge, MA service mesh startup, announced some big changes to its approach today with a full-stack platform of services aimed squarely at the enterprise. The culmination of this will be Gloo Mesh Enterprise, a new product that will be available in Beta by the end of the year.

Service meshes are part of a cloud native, containerized approach to development that enable micro services to communicate with one another.

Idit Levine, founder and CEO at Solo, says that she began by creating individual components since launching the company in 2017 because she knew that it was early for service meshes. Today’s announcement is about bringing all of these components the company has created into a more coherent and connected enterprise product.

While she was worried at first that the pandemic would have a negative impact on business, she says that her company has been busier than ever and today’s announcement is really about giving customers what they have been asking for throughout this tumultuous year.

Most of Solo’s customers are running Kubernetes and they needed some missing pieces that Solo was happy to provide for them. The first problem is the primary reason the company started, which was to manage service meshes, and Gloo Mesh, which is based on the open source Istio service mesh, helps developers manage their service mesh clusters.

Another problem involved running containers at the edge, which required an API gateway. To that end, the company announced Gloo Edge, an API gateway built on the Envoy Proxy, an edge service proxy. Running applications at the edge means they get the resources they need to improve performance and save bandwidth.

The third piece is called Gloo Portal. This provides a centralized, self-service catalog of services that developers can tap into as they are building their applications. The final piece is Gloo Extensions, which provides a way for developers to access or build extensions called web assembly modules.

All of these pieces are available as open source, but companies that want additional functionality and support and a way to connect all of these pieces will need to buy the enterprise product. Among the additional features in the enterprise version is the ability to apply roles to the APIs in Gloo Edge to control who has access. Gloo Mesh users get production Istio support including updates and patches. It also includes a dashboard for managing clusters and developer tools for building web assembly pieces in Gloo Extension

The company has raised over $36 million, according to Pitchbook data. The most recent deal was $23 million in September. Levine says the startup has several dozen large customers at this point and 35 employees. She said she is actively hiring and expects to be at 50 soon.

When IBM announced it was spinning out its infrastructure services business last month, it was surely a sign that the company was going all in on hybrid cloud. Today in an interview with Jon Fortt at the CNBC Evolve summit, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna made it clear that his whole focus is going to be on transforming his organization into a hybrid cloud management vendor moving forward.

That means that instead of trying to primarily sell its own infrastructure or software services — although it will continue to do that — it will concentrate on leveraging Red Hat, the company it bought for $34 billion in 2018, to help customers manage their hybrid environments regardless of location. That could be on prem or it could be with any of the public cloud providers or anything in between.

Krishna sees this acquisition as a key part of the transition strategy to capture what he estimates is a trillion dollar opportunity in the hybrid cloud management market, and he believes his company is well-positioned to grab a piece of that. “The Red Hat acquisition gave us the technology base on which to build a hybrid cloud technology platform based on open-source, and based on giving choice to our clients as they embark on this journey. With the success of that acquisition now giving us the fuel, we can then take the next step, and the larger step, of taking the managed infrastructure services out. So the rest of the company can be absolutely focused on hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence,” Krishna told CNBC.

While he recognizes that Microsoft and Amazon are powerful players in the public cloud, he doesn’t see them as competitors, so much as partners in this new approach. In fact, mixing in a broad variety of third party partners is a big part of this.

“I look at both Microsoft and Amazon as likely partners in this journey, not as being the one and two [in market share]. In the hybrid world the question is where does the client want to decide where the workload runs? They could run it on Amazon. They can run on Microsoft. They can run it on IBM or they can run it on premises,” he said.

He believes that Red Hat can be the glue to hold this environment together and let customers have a single way of managing this complexity. The key question for IBM is whether customers see IBM and by extension Red Hat, as the key vendor for this role.

He recognizes that this isn’t just about adding and subtracting technology pieces. When it comes to transforming the way you do business in this way, it requires a massive cultural shift, one we saw Satya Nadella pull off when he took over as CEO at Microsoft in 2014. Much like Nadella, Krishna was promoted from within. He understands how things operate and that he needs to change the way things have traditionally been done at Big Blue if he’s going to succeed.

“I’ve talked a lot internally about a growth mindset, and about being much more entrepreneurial. And we can be entrepreneurs, even within large companies. But it comes from having extreme focus. So when we provide the focus of being focused on hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence, which I believe are the two fundamental forces, then you say how do you unlock everybody being able to go after that,” he said.

That’s going to be the big key for him moving forward as transforming a company the size of IBM is going to be a tremendous challenge for him as a leader. As Fortt pointed out, IBM salespeople are used to focusing on IBM products. This approach means they have to look at the market much more broadly, and that requires a new mindset. It will be up to Krishna to lead the way and make sure that his employees are on the same page about this. The success of this approach depends on that.

Mozart Data founders Peter Fishman and Dan Silberman have been friends for over 20 years, working at various startups, and even launching a hot sauce company together along the way. As technologists, they saw companies building a data stack over and over. They decided to provide one for them and Mozart Data was born.

The company graduated from the Y Combinator Summer 2020 cohort in August and announced a $4 million seed round today led by Craft Ventures and Array Ventures with participation from Coelius Capital, Jigsaw VC, Signia VC, Taurus VC and various angel investors.

In spite of the detour into hot sauce, the two founders were mostly involved in data over the years and they formed strong opinions about what a data stack should look like. “We wanted to bring the same stack that we’ve been building at all these different startups, and make it available more broadly,” Fishman told TechCrunch.

They see a modern data stack as one that has different databases, SaaS tools and data sources. They pull it together, process it and make it ready for whatever business intelligence tool you use. “We do all of the parts before the BI tool. So we extract and load the data. We manage a data warehouse for you under the hood in Snowflake, and we provide a layer for you to do transformations,” he said.

The service is aimed mostly at technical people who know some SQL like data analysts, data scientists and sales and marketing operations. They founded the company earlier this year with their own money, and joined Y Combinator in June. Today, they have about a dozen customers and six employees. They expect to add 10-12 more in the next year.

Fishman says they have mostly hired from their networks, but have begun looking outward as they make their next hires with a goal of building a diverse company. In fact, they have made offers to several diverse candidates, who didn’t ultimately take the job, but he believes if you start looking at the top of the funnel, you will get good results. “I think if you spend a lot of energy in terms of top of funnel recruiting, you end up getting a good, diverse set at the bottom,” he said.

The company has been able to start from scratch in the midst of a pandemic and add employees and customers because the founders had a good network to pitch the product to, but they understand that moving forward they will have to move outside of that. They plan to use their experience as users to drive their message.

“I think talking about some of the whys and the rationale is our strategy for adding value to customers […], it’s about basically how would we set up a data stack if we were at this type of startup,” he said.