Mesosphere’s recent name change to D2iQ saw a long-time industry stalwart pivot in both its name and its focus. It also joined a number of other vendors that have in recent months re-oriented their operations to take advantage of Kubernetes adoption across the enterprise space and better focus their work on the burgeoning Kubernetes ecosystem.

The D2iQ move specifically has the company shifting its focus from working with customers to set up initial development work needed for their cloud-native platforms to so-called “day two” operations. This is around the actual support of those platforms running in a production environment.

The D2iQ shift has it leaning more heavily on the Kubernetes ecosystem. That shift has been supported by the growing push of Kubernetes adoption as a cloud-native platform and the surrounding growth of supporting dependents. These include tools like the Prometheus monitoring platform, and Envoy and Istio service mesh platforms.

D2iQ co-founder and CTO Tobi Knaup explained that push had a “significant” impact on its decision. “Not just the push by the ecosystem, but the pace of advancement in Kubernetes capabilities,” Knaup wrote in an email to SDxCentral.

Analysts applauded the move, citing the need for vendors to move to where their customers have the greatest needs.

“Kubernetes is emerging as a key deployment and operations framework for cloud-native applications to help anchor production deployments in both private and hybrid multi-cloud implementations,” explained Paul Parker-Johnson, principal analyst at ACG Research, in an email to SDxCentral tied to the D2iQ rebranding. “To frame its product and services offerings in a way that directly enables 'day two' operational capabilities for Kubernetes-based applications leans directly into the main line of where app developers want to go and where operations teams need to go as well.”

And that need is moving quickly. A recent survey conducted by security firm StackRox found that 86% of organizations are using Kubernetes compared with 57% just six months ago. A report from Gartner predicts that more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2022, compared to less than 30% today.

However, this Kubernetes adoption and sprawl has added a layer of operational complexity. James Governor, analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, noted in a recent blog post that: “Kubernetes is extremely sophisticated, but with great sophistication comes great complexity.”

This has opened the door for companies like D2iQ to migrate their focus from that initial development work to a role in production support. Governor cited others including Docker Inc. and Pivotal Software that have made this move.

Docker Inc.’s recent 3.0 update for its flagship Enterprise platform was based heavily on deeper Kubernetes integration. It also included its own version of a hosted Kubernetes service dubbed the Docker Kubernetes Service (DKS).

Pivotal Software launched alpha versions of two of its managed platforms and plans to move a third to that status later this year. The moves are part of its broader push to ease enterprise management of cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes.

“Kubernetes is a runaway train right now, and organizations are struggling to keep deployments and management on track,” Governor wrote in a press release tied to the Pivotal Software launch. “They want to standardize processes, tools, and people, but face a fragmented, complex, and rapidly changing environment. Pivotal has a history of standardizing and documenting cloud-native tools and methods and is now applying that experience to Kubernetes and associated technology – like Istio. It is finessing the industry shift to Kubernetes by taking management features from the Pivotal Application Service and re-applying them.”

IBM has done something similar with its Red Hat acquisition. The company earlier this month migrated all of its legacy software portfolio to be available through Red Hat’s Kubernetes-focused OpenShift platform. This will allow customers to use that software as IBM Cloud Paks across any public or private cloud environment.

Bala Rajaraman, an IBM fellow and vice president of IBM Cloud, explained that IBM’s software has been more product oriented, while the Cloud Pak initiative is more focused on functional outcomes. He noted that this required new models of integration that also could adopt to existing systems. “It’s about bringing them together in a functional way to serve business and IT outcomes,” Rajaraman said.

Parker-Johnson concurred, noting that this deeper integration by vendors in light of broader Kubernetes adoption “should help their customers move forward in their app designs and their operations smartly.”