Developers looking for an easy way to get started with Kubernetes now have two more options to try: Engine Yard Kontainers and Hitachi Kubernetes Service (HKS).

Hitachi Vantara unveiled its new offering today, promising customers a consistent way of deploying, managing, monitoring, and governing Kubernetes clusters “across major cloud providers and on premises”, following the hybrid or multi-cloud trend in organisations. Multi-cloud in this case means using cloud services by several providers for storage and computing tasks, while hybrid implies a mix of public cloud providers, and private or on-premises resources.

Much like similar products, HKS’s selling points include a centralised UI for managing a customer’s various Kubernetes environments, role-based access control across all clusters, as well as a way to monitor and log activity across clusters. To make sure developers can start deploying quickly, HKS comes fitted with a self-service catalogue for app environments using Helm or Operators.

Hitachi Vantara also highlighted its security features, such as secure communication between the clusters and the management plane, which is clearly geared towards the org’s usual enterprise clientele, bare metal management capabilities, and functionality supposed to improve automatic scaling.

Engine Yard Kontainers (EYK) is a bit different in that it runs on Amazon Web Services only, which isn’t a huge surprise, though, since the company has started to describe itself as an NoOps solution for AWS. This might be grounded in the company’s new vision which it laid out last November and in which EYK plays a central role. 

Instead of facilitating app deployment in the cloud, Engine Yard has shifted towards a more container-centric approach. The focus is now on helping teams to run their apps on container infrastructure without much prior knowledge, and offering a leg up when it comes to provisioning and accessing AWS managed resources and automatic scaling. 

To make it beginner friendly, EYK is said to offer Applications Stacks to those who don’t know how to containerise their applications yet, and provision private clusters without outbound internet access as a default for added security.

The newfound container focus came as a bit of a surprise, since Engine Yard said it wanted to get back to its Ruby on Rails roots after being bought by Ruby specialists Crossover and selling Kubernetes tooling provider Deis in 2017.