Hitachi Kubernetes Service: A Much-Needed “Easy Button” for Managing Enterprise-Grade K8 Clusters

Backed and Supported by Hitachi

I have witnessed many exciting changes in virtualization technology over the course of my career. Perhaps the most disruptive is happening right now, as the world’s large enterprises rapidly shift to containerized workloads and Kubernetes as critical components of a cloud-native approach to software development.

The move to a cloud-native approach in software development has become an unstoppable force. In its most recent survey, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found that 84% of respondents were running containers in production. In 2019, the percentage of companies running 250 or more containers in production grew by 28 percent, crossing the 50 percent threshold for the first time. In addition, the report made it clear that Kubernetes has become the overwhelming choice for container orchestration, with more than three in four firms using Kubernetes in some fashion. And all of this was before the pandemic, which has further accelerated digital transformation initiatives and “cloud-native” software development approaches.

But Kubernetes is complex. It takes a lot of effort to sustain and manage it. For example:

• While it’s incredibly easy to spin up a container with Kubernetes, deleting that container is not as straightforward, which leads to code abandonment.
• There’s a huge skills shortage in the DevOps/cloud-native world.
• Vendor training and support too often are lacking, anemic and/or limited to only a portion of the enterprise environment.
• Management, compliance and governance are complex.
• It’s tough managing isolated Kubernetes deployments in various clouds, and optimizing them where you need them.

Hitachi Kubernetes Service is an orchestration platform that manages all of these headaches for our customers. In short, it’s an “easy button” for enterprise grade K8s clusters, helping organizations adopt cloud native infrastructure faster, simplifying how developers use and consume IT-delivered container services, whether from on-premise or hybrid environments.

How do we do it?

• Our UI is modern, clean and simple and our unified dashboard vastly simplifies management and governance of multiple clusters.
• We’re agnostic, allowing you to orchestrate, manage and transport Kubernetes environments across any cloud, whether private, multi-cloud or hybrid.
• We offer bare metal management capabilities so you can manage on-premise without the need for hypervisors.
• You can leverage our Hitachi Kubernetes Service catalog to browse and deploy standard, template based applications or customize to match your business requirements.
• The service provides enterprise-grade security with secure communications between clusters and the SaaS management plane in the cloud.
• Deploying our upstream K8s distribution saves months of development and operations time for things such as integration, test, upgrade and review cycles.
• We provide extensive customer training including numerous Kubernetes and cloud native courses designed to improve the skills of our customers.
• Hitachi’s global customer services organization supports the Hitachi Kubernetes Service environment delivering it as a cloud managed, Software as a Service offering.

In addition, Hitachi Kubernetes Service offers an AI-powered capability that automates autoscaling of the underlying infrastructure in order to save costs, better handle traffic spikes and avoid unexpected failures in the environment.

In short, cloud-native development, containers and Kubernetes are here to stay. Hitachi Kubernetes Service is the K8s “easy button”. It helps enterprise customers moving cloud-native applications from sandbox into production and for the many expanding mid-sized businesses that need to “enterprise-grade” their growing Kubernetes environments. With truly agnostic Kubernetes management capabilities, an extensible service catalog and comprehensive customer training programs all backed by Hitachi’s global customer service organization.

It’s never been more critical to accelerate digital transformation efforts. Containers, Kubernetes – and now the Hitachi Kubernetes Service – are indispensable tools in the digital transformation journey and enterprise cloud-native toolkit.