To learn how D2iQ can help your organization gain Kubernetes agility and get on the winning side of the smart cloud-native revolution, speak with the experts at D2iQ.
D2iQ celebrates its 10th anniversary this week. What is remarkable about this decade of growth is the way the maturation of the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) has followed the curve of Kubernetes maturation and adoption.
As last week’s KubeCon Europe 2023 conference showed, the container management technology that D2iQ's founders pioneered is going gangbusters.
In tracing the arc of D2iQ’s growth, we see that its founders were among the first to bring cloud-native container-management infrastructures to market. Over the ensuing decade, the original cloud-native infrastructure they pioneered evolved to become the state-of-the-art Kubernetes management platform that D2iQ delivers today.
Right Place, Right Time, Right Technology
After moving to Silicon Valley, D2iQ CEO Tobi Knaup and his boyhood friend Florian Leibert had become the tech leads for AirBnB and Twitter, respectively, which were new services at the time. As their companies grew, the IT infrastructures could not adequately support the large number of users. When traffic surged on Twitter, the system would crash and members would be presented with the iconic Twitter fail whale.
With the help of their friend Ben Hindman, who was researching containerized systems at Berkeley, Tobi and Florian implemented containerized infrastructures at AirBnB and Twitter that were based on the Borg technology Google had developed to manage its large-scale infrastructure.
As Tobi recalls, he and his co-founders realized that the scalability problems they were solving for Twitter and AirBnB were not unique and that over time organizations worldwide would adopt cloud-native infrastructures.
“That's when we founded the company because we had what investors always like to call the ‘unfair advantage’ in that we knew this technology, we understood containers, and we were some of the only people in the world at the time that did,” says Tobi.
From the beginning, the value of D2iQ’s containerized platform was recognized by the U.S. intelligence community and major banks, which were among its first adopters. Over time, D2iQ’s platform has been deployed by a broad array of Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. This includes major system integrators like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, and GDIT that have chosen DKP as the Kubernetes platform on which they are basing container management solutions for their customers.
Simplification Through Automation
The guiding principles that informed the design of D2iQ’s cloud-native platform were not only scalability and reliability, but also ease of deployment and management. These design principles stemmed from the headaches Tobi and Florian experienced when managing the original AirBnB and Twitter infrastructures.
“We were the guys with the pagers, when something failed in production at three AM in the morning, our pagers would go off and a lot of times it was stuff that could have been fixed automatically by software,” Tobi recalls.
The cloud-native containerized infrastructures they developed for AirBnB and Twitter included self-healing and failover automation that eliminated the problems and made their lives easier.
As Tobi relates, “That was the moment where we thought, wow, we really have something very powerful at our hands here, and it's that mythical ten X technology that really just revolutionized everything.”
Innovation Never Stops
The pioneering spirit that animated the founding of D2iQ has not left the company. As innovative new services arise within the open-source community, DKP's modular and open design enables new features to be added easily to the platform to increase its power, scope, and ease of management.
A great leap forward was made in DKP 2.0 in which Cluster API (CAPI) and FluxCD were added to the platform. CAPI and FluxCD are fundamental elements that provide simplification through automation to enable “Kubernetes management done right.”
The advances introduced in DKP 2.0 have been furthered in subsequent releases in which multi-cloud and multi-cluster management have been simplified and extended across all environments, including the top three cloud service providers. These enhancements give DKP unparalleled fleet management capabilities through a single centralized management plane.
With Kubernetes established as the de facto container management standard, innovation is coalescing around the platform to further simplify its management. Going forward, DKP will continue to be enhanced through the addition of innovative technologies that are incubated within the open source ecosystem.
D2iQ’s mission is to “deliver an intelligent and secure cloud-native platform that unleashes innovation.” In fulfilling this mission, D2iQ is providing the cloud-native platform that is spearheading the digital revolution and ushering in the smart cloud-native future.
To learn how D2iQ can help your organization gain Kubernetes agility and get on the winning side of the smart cloud-native revolution, speak with the experts at D2iQ.
