D2iQ, the company formerly known as Mesosphere, has launched version 1.3 of its commercial managed Kubernetes platform Konvoy which amongst other things improves governance aspects and turns it into an option for air-gapped environments.

The company introduced Konvoy in August 2019 as a simpler approach to production-ready Kubernetes. It bundles clusters with (mostly open source) components for operation and lifecycle management, including monitoring, networking and storage capabilities. This should, amongst other things, reduce the number of commands needed to set up enterprise-grade environments, which is meant to make it a more accessible option.

In the newly released version, the D2iQ team plays to the enterprise crowd it is trying to reach by looking into ways of satisfying its target audience’s need for security. It, for example, added support for isolated environments without connection to outside networks, so-called air-gapped setups.

Konvoy now also includes a way of previewing changes to an infrastructure, which should add another layer of safety for operators. Meanwhile the newly available ability to automate custom certificate support and integration of OPA Gatekeeper for policy management is meant to up the distro’s governance game.

Since a growing number of companies are looking into using Kubernetes as part of their data analytics and machine learning strategy these days, D2iQ has also looked into ways of improving that experience as well. The first result comes in the form of the capability to “set GPUs within a specific node and affiliate the workloads best fitted to GPUs”. Additional operators to make the most of those processors are planned to follow “in coming quarters”.

The last set of features highlighted for this release concern the support of public cloud offerings. Beside reducing the command to spin up a cluster on Azure down to “konvoy up”, a private beta for those looking to use Konvoy in the Google Cloud has been started. More details can be found in the announcement post.