Elastisys CEO Robert Winter is interviewed in the newest issue of Data Centers in northern Sweden about container orchestration and trends for cloud and data centers 5-10 years ahead.
Excerpt:
What types of customers come to you?
We work with a lot of companies that have strict security requirements regarding how their workloads and data are managed – these can be in regulated industries like healthcare, financial services or public sector that have regulations like ISO-27001, PCI-DSS or GDPR governing them, or just security-minded enterprises in general. Another common type of customers are the ones who need to build cloud-agnostic solutions that are not tied to any specific cloud-provider’s services but instead can run everywhere from on-premise data centers to different cloud providers located across the globe; then cloud-native software like Kubernetes are a great fit.
A common use case when companies reach out to us is when they need to migrate to a European cloud provider either for regulatory reasons or when entering new markets. Then we help them get an equivalent experience for their container based application stack as they are used to from the big hyperscale cloud providers.
What do your customers get at Elastisys what they can’t get anywhere else?
Fully featured managed services for the most common cloud native open source projects like Kubernetes, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Prometheus and NATS that allow customers to consume their modern open source stack in the way they are used to from the big American hyperscale clouds, but with a strong focus on data security and regulatory compliance while doing so. Also they get their choice of running it as a managed service on top of a number of cloud providers located under European jurisdiction, or as in the case of Compliant Kubernetes, downloading the source code and running it themselves.
How is your company connected to data centers?
We partner with a lot of great data center providers that want to allow their customers to consume cloud native services. Currently we offer a range of services together with different data center partners ranging from managed container services to databases, logging, monitoring, message queues and all the other cloud native components modern organizations utilize to deliver their software faster and better to their users.
Do you see any trends in the future regarding data centers, 5-10 years ahead globally and in Northern Sweden?
In contrast to early expectations for cloud computing to converge to a small number of hyperscale providers, we now see a growing interest in using local, national or European data centers. This is partly driven by the need to comply to national and European legislations, partly a matter of trust and comfort. There is also a mega-trend away from only providing raw virtualized hardware and using virtual machines to instead provide services based on higher layer abstractions like containers and Kubernetes to allow customer to build their applications faster, more available and more cloud-agnostic.
Read the full interview here.