One Kubernetes Service to manage them all – not an insignificant thing in a market where many major players are services offered by proprietary clouds.
Ian Sinclair, CTO at Hitachi Canada
Hitachi Vantara has announced the availability of Hitachi Kubernetes Service, an enterprise-grade managed SaaS service designed specifically to manage multiple Kubernetes environments, including the cloud-specific services of their competitors.
“The market already has multiple Kubernetes services, notably those from competitors like Google, AWS, Microsoft, VMware and Red Hat,” said Ian Sinclair, CTO at Hitachi Canada. “Those services are native to their platforms and are dependent on them. Our differentiation is that we allow you to use any of the available systems as they are, through a single management pane of glass and dashboard. There is no singular reliance on any one cloud. We are truly cloud-agnostic, which makes us vendor lock-in free.”
The Hitachi Kubernetes Service features pre-populated applications in their self-service catalogue, to help developers start rapidly using these curated Kubernetes-based orchestration and container services across a hybrid Kubernetes landscape.
“The self -service catalogue is an important differentiation for us, which builds on the service’s foundation,” Sinclair indicated. “It takes advantage of the ecosystem out there, and that composability will help them accelerate their application development.”
The Hitachi Kubernetes Service will be aimed at a broad customer base, not just Hitachi’s larger customers with more complex environments.
“As I have conversations with customers, everyone wants to manage risk effectively,” Sinclair said. “A Not-for-Profit that we work with takes advantage of multi-Kubernetes providers because as a Not-for-Profit, they need to consume free credits wherever possible. That’s one case which reflects that across the board, everyone is taking advantage of multi-Kubernetes clouds. We make it simple and easy for them to do this, with the ability to consume and standardize management in one place.”
The new offering will be supported by Hitachi Vantara’s Global Customer Service organization, but the company also sees this as a strong channel service.
“At this time, our primary focus is the channel, so we expect this will be a strong channel offering,” Sinclair noted.
Sinclair also said to expect more SaaS offerings like this one.
“This is going to form the foundation for many new as-a-service offerings to come,” he indicated. “We will provide these to our partners, and will also consume them internally.”
The Hitachi Kubernetes Service is available today on AWS. It will be available on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud early in 2021.
