Software containers have emerged as a useful tool to build cloud-native applications that can be built just once and run anywhere, while Kubernetes software has zoomed to prominence as the way to deploy those apps at large scale.

But those tools both require very specialized skills to implement, so infrastructure companies believe enterprises will benefit from managed services to help run them on private and public clouds.

With that in mind, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. Monday updated its OneSphere hybrid cloud management product with new “container service” capabilities. The idea is to help enterprises keep up with the requirements for constant orchestration and scaling of containerized apps, the company said.

HPE said the value proposition of its platform is it provides a comprehensive view of what’s happening across an enterprises’ private and public cloud platforms. As a result, they can use OneSphere to accelerate the deployment of containerized apps across private VMware Inc.-based clouds, the company said. With the service, HPE said, companies can spend more time on building their apps, and less time worrying about operations.

HPE is hoping to fill a growing skills gap, since it’s widely known that enterprises are struggling to recruit the skilled personnel needed to manage deployments of container infrastructure. When they use a managed service, companies don’t need to hire quite so many infrastructure specialists, only the developers they need to build their applications.

“IT organizations hoping to adopt these rapidly evolving technologies must employ highly skilled staff with deep understanding of open source in order to deploy, operate and maintain these platforms,” Wayland Jeong, vice president and general manager of HPE’s hybrid cloud unit, said in a blog post. “Such skills are difficult to hire and retain, making it a challenge for many teams to adopt these modern frameworks.”

One of the main benefits of HPE’s OneSphere service is it allows companies to use the same tool across both private and public clouds, meaning they can deploy workloads to both types of platforms from the same interface without changing any code.

“It provides CxOs a better single pane of glass to run their next-generation applications,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc.

OneSphere currently supports Kubernetes clusters running on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud and VMware private clouds. HPE said it will be previewing OneSphere’s new container management capabilities during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas next week.

Image: HPE