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

Backed and Supported by Hitachi

I’ve witnessed many exciting leaps in virtualization technology over the course of my career. But the biggest change I’ve ever seen 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%, crossing the 50% 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 and 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 K8 clusters: It helps organizations adopt cloud-native infrastructure faster, simplifying how developers use and consume IT-delivered container services, whether from on-premises or hybrid environments.

How do we do it?

• Our user interface is modern, clean and simple and our unified dashboard vastly simplifies management and governance of multiple clusters.
• We’re agnostic, so you can orchestrate, manage and transport Kubernetes environments across any cloud structure, whether private, multicloud or hybrid.
• We also offer exceptional bare metal management capabilities, so you can manage on premises, without the need for hypervisors.
• You can leverage our existing Hitachi Kubernetes Service catalog for premade templates or customize to match your business requirements.
• The service provides enterprise-grade security with secure communications between clusters and the software-as-a-service (SaaS ) management pane in the cloud.
• Subscribing to our upstream distribution and the associated tooling saves months of development and operations time for things such as integration, as well as test and review cycles.
• Our extensive customer training includes 10 courses designed to improve the internal skills of our customers. And the entire Hitachi Kubernetes Service environment, including open-source tools in the catalog, is supported by Hitachi’s global customer service organization.

In addition to the above, Hitachi Kubernetes Service offers a proprietary, artificial-intelligence-powered capability that automates autoscaling. This approach saves costs, better handles traffic spikes and avoids unexpected failures in your environment.

In short, cloud-native development, containers and Kubernetes are here to stay . Hitachi Kubernetes Service provides the “easy button” for our Hitachi enterprise customers moving cloud-native applications from sandbox into production. It also serves the many expanding midsized businesses that need to bring their growing Kubernetes environments up to “enterprise grade.” We provide truly agnostic Kubernetes management capabilities, an extensive and extensible service catalog, and comprehensive customer training programs. And all are backed by Hitachi’s global customer service organization.

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