Startup Kontena has launched a container and microservices platform that, it claims, is designed to be developer friendly, easy to install and able to run at any scale -- attributes that, Kontena says, differentiate it from the current crop of container platforms.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, founded in March 2015, has also raised $2 million seed funding from Helsinki-based Lifeline Ventures. It also has a clever name: Say it out loud -- cute, huh?

According to the team at Kontena Inc. , the startup's container and microservices platform requires zero maintenance, is designed for automatic updates, and runs on any infrastructure, including on-premises, cloud and hybrid. Combined, those attributes make it an easy-to-use alternative to platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes, Heroku and Mesosphere, the company says.

"We're more targeted for developers, rather than DevOps people," Miska Kaipiainen, CEO and co-founder, tells Light Reading.

Kaipiainen says he has experience running "a huge container platform in one big enterprise." He adds, "I felt the pain where we had to spend a huge amount of time deploying the platform and maintaining the platform." Kontena is designed to spare developers that pain, he claims.

Kontena sells "with batteries included" -- built-in orchestration, scheduling, overlay networking, services and discovery, and registry for Docker images, Kaipiainen says.

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Kontena is available as open source, with the vendor providing support, training and a hardened version with SLAs.

Ease of use is a hotspot for competition among container companies. In June, Docker Inc. came out with a new version of its namesake container management with built-in orchestration support, presenting it as an easier-to-use alternative to Kubernetes. (See Docker Targets Google Kubernetes.)

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— Mitch Wagner, , Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud