Accel-backed infrastructure automation startup Heptio Inc. today released Gimbal, an open-source load balancer designed to remove a major obstacle standing in the way of enterprises looking to adopt Kubernetes.

Kubernetes, which was developed by Heptio’s two co-founders during their time at Google LLC, which turned it into open-source software, is the go-tool system for managing software container deployments. Software containers can streamline application projects by enabling developers to easily move code across different infrastructure.

More and more enterprises are looking to adopt the technology in a bid to speed up their development operations. However, setting up a large Kubernetes-powered environment alongside a company’s existing infrastructure can prove difficult in many cases.

Heptio said Gimbal eases a key aspect of the challenge: traffic management. Specifically, the project aims to provide a “unified” platform for managing network requests to a company’s Kubernetes-powered container clusters and traditional infrastructure. The startup claims that it thus removes the need for enterprises to make major changes to their existing systems in order to accommodate Kubernetes.

Heptio is positioning Gimbal as an alternative to the more established, proprietary load balancers on the market. According to the startup, those offerings are often not built to handle the unique operational requirements of Kubernetes clusters. The startup also sees companies deploying the tool on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services to substitute the native load balancing services.

Since Gimbal was born from a project that Heptio did for Yahoo Japan Corp. subsidiary Actapio, the current alpha version of the system is mainly designed to work OpenStack, which powers the latter’s company data centers. But the startup intends to enhance its support for other infrastructure platforms in the future. Moreover, Chief Executive Officer Craig McLuckie told VentureBeat that the plan is eventually to incorporate Gimbal into its recently introduced commercial Kubernetes Subscription offering.

Heptio’s effort to monetize Kubernetes is already bearing fruit. The startup claims to have seen revenues grow 140 percent from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the first quarter of 2018.

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