XigXog Announces KubeFox
My colleague John and I faced a life change when we left our prior company and decided that we wanted to launch a company together. That led to the founding of XigXog. While we determined that we wanted to work together and agreed on some basics (like we wanted the project to be open source, we wanted to do something in the Kubernetes arena), deciding what we wanted to do took a little time. We both had experience in the medical device industry, shared particular enthusiasm for cloud technologies and built products in that space, had strong storage backgrounds - both appliance and cloud, and enjoyed large scale projects and problems. Fast forward a few months and a number of “How about this?” followed by research followed by mutual vetoes…

We retrenched and returned to something we had experienced at our prior employer: while we were both big fans of Kubernetes - the space, community, companies involved - we had to spend a lot of time on DevOps. Configuration, product selection, deployment, release, vendor contracts etc. were all time consuming and taxing – and engineering teams were frequently dragged into these exercises. It wasn’t just the need to identify good DevOps people and build the team; even when DevOps was staffed, developers were operating far less than optimally. And if they lacked DevOps knowledge and skills – even more so. Zero trust, for instance, wasn’t something I viewed as a nice-to-have, but the overhead of implementing it across teams was quite high. Angst ensued when we endeavored to federate monitoring and notification in current and legacy generation products. Did it all need to be so hard?

What if we could take the pain out of the software lifecycle, provide for zero trust, deliver span-based telemetry and provided for versioning - straight out of the box? What if developers could focus on the application? What if they could test, readily and easily, side-by-side with legacy code? Without DevOps involvement and without requiring them to spend half their time on configuration-related minutiae. John coined the name “KubeFox” and off we went.

Today is the Beta debut of KubeFox. The key capabilities are:

• Virtual environments
• Zero Trust
• Versioned deployments
• Metrics, tracing, logging federated and at your fingertips (this is near term)

KubeFox determines what changes you’ve made at the repo level, builds the containers and deploys only those components that are unique. It enables you to build and rapidly test new code, in sandboxes that appear to be independent. Behind the scenes, KubeFox is combatting sprawl; it can run multiple versions of an application with the collection of components distilled to only those that are unique, drastically reducing footprint and controlling costs. You’ll be able to look at applications and components and observe metrics, logs and traces. And by the way, that zero trust thing? It’s built in.

It's a very exciting time. We’re Beta because we still have some work to do in some key areas. We wanted to get out into the world sooner rather than later. Anyone who’s built software products understands that there’s always one more enhancement to make. That’s part of the fun! It’s time to get out to the community and get some feedback.

The product is open source and XigXog is a CNCF member. We would love it if people played with it, provided us with feedback and contributed to the project if they felt so inclined. The easiest path is to go through the Quickstart and take a look at the docs.

Quickstart is here: https://docs.kubefox.io/quickstart.html
Docs are here: https://docs.kubefox.io/index.html

I would be remiss if I didn’t issue a hearty and heartfelt “Thank You” to all of you involved with XigXog and those who have helped and encouraged along the way.

Lastly, we have a number of other ideas and we’re very excited about XigXog’s future. Thank you for reading!