D2iQ's multi-cluster and multicloud DKP Kubernetes platform, which is now available in version 2.3, renders the company a true Switzerland of the industry, CEO Tobi Knaup told SDxCentral.

The marquee DKP 2.3 feature is “a really deep integration with the hyperscalers' Kubernetes offerings,” which predominantly includes Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). In terms of deeper integration with additional Kubernetes orchestration platforms in the future, the company's customers will ultimately decide.

“We do want to be that single control plane that allows the customer to manage the entire Kubernetes fleet, wherever that may be.” He added that while DKP has specific integrations with AKS and EKS, it “can also help manage, to some degree, any Kubernetes. As long as it's CNCF compatible, customers can bring their own,” he said.

This echoes the self-proclaimed philosophy of VMware's Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) 1.3, which debuted at VMware Explore 2022 to support the vendor's multicloud, open ecosystem strategy.

“We’re trying to be doing good things for the industry [by] collapsing complexity to make operators and developers more and more productive,” VMware Tanzu SVP Edward Hieatt told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. “The idea is we’re the open company to bring your own Kubernetes, right, and that extends to, perhaps you might say competitors’ Kubernetes, because we want to be open and capture all the — be the Switzerland.”

And in terms of one company “coming in and saying let’s make sense of all of this, I do think you can say VMware is unique,” Hieatt touted.

“It's not unique, because we do it too,” Knaup noted. And actually, neither of the companies' agnostic efforts are all that ground breaking. “A lot of companies are trying to get at a multicloud solution again,” and “a lot of vendors have gone in that direction already, so it's really nothing unique,” Knaup explained. “In fact, all the [cloud] providers even have a multicloud strategy, right, where they now try to manage some workloads on their competitor's cloud.”

Moreover, the commonalities between many vendors' current multicloud ambitions serve as “a great proof point that, really, the world is moving toward multi and hybrid cloud,” Knaup added.

D2iQ stands apart from VMware because “we are truly independent in that we only do Kubernetes. It's a pure play,” Knaup said.

“We don't sell virtualization software. We don't sell operating systems. And we support a lot of different operating systems, so we're not limited to an operating system that we sell ourselves,” he said, explaining this allows the company to integrate with any virtualization tech.

“We actually work really well on VMware vSphere [and] have a really great integration there,” because vSphere's virtualization layer exists in a lot of D2iQ customer environments. “That's why we can be Switzerland and integrate with the leading cloud providers, and even with VMware,” Knaup said.

Despite the onslaught of efforts claiming to erase multicloud and multi-cluster complexity, Knaup has seen a good deal of customer skepticism around whether those multicloud solutions will work the same on each different cloud provider. “That's where we have a really strong story and come in and as Switzerland – us as a neutral, independent platform to manage all those environments,” he said.

Knaup also hears from customers that with DKP, they can get to value significantly faster than with any other vendor. “Customers are often able to stand up our product in a matter of hours,” he touted, adding other vendors' platforms can sometimes take months before applications are running.

“We can do that in a matter of hours, even in some tricky environments” like cruise ships that regularly encounter air-gapped areas and the inside of an MRI scanner. These are funky environments that prove operationally difficult because Kubernetes was designed for the cloud, not for the middle of the ocean, he explained.

D2iQ has done a lot of work in that area “and made it work really well,” Knaup said. “Time to value is something where we just architected our product very differently, and that's why our customers can get to success much, much sooner.”

Knaup explained D2iQ partnered with major hyperscalers because “those cloud Kubernetes offerings are very popular,” and the EKS integration with DKP adds “a ton of capabilities around EKS to make it easy for organizations to manage EKS.”

In terms of enterprise attitudes and adoption, “Kubernetes has really become mainstream. It's no longer a situation where people are wondering, what is this new shiny object?” he said.

But Kubernetes alone isn't an enterprise grade solution, unless enterprises put “a dozen other open source pieces around Kubernetes to really have a solution that works in production, that is secure, that has observability, and things like that,” he explained. That do-it-yourself approach is not something he recommends teams without highly skilled individuals attempt.

But that's where DKP 2.3 and its multi-cluster, multicloud management gets to shine. “The first thing [DKP] does in conjunction with EKS – it really, instead of you the user having to add all these other pieces yourself, DKP brings all those pieces to now EKS or also AKS – really any CNCF-compatible Kubernetes cluster,” Knaup said.

Those pieces, which Knaup describes as “day two” add ons, are “basically all the components that you need to be successful on day two. It's things around governance, access control, it's workloads, it's observability, to really give you secure clusters.” The platform's aim is “rounding up the solution and giving the easy button for a fully production grade solution instead of you having to add all those pieces yourself,” he explained.