D2iQ announced the newest version of its D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP). With customer-led updates, DKP 2.5 empowers enterprises and public sector organizations to simplify and streamline the management of multi-cluster deployments regardless of where the cluster groups are running. 

Key enhancements in DKP 2.5 include:

• Centralized multi-cloud, multicluster fleet management. DKP Enterprise 2.5 enables customers with multi-cluster deployments to more easily manage fleets of clusters through federating application management. This enables a central platform engineering team to ensure consistency and compliance regardless of where a cluster is running. Through centralized fleet management, the ease of deployment and management will be consistent as you grow your infrastructure from single clusters to multiple clusters. 
• Easily expand DKP from single-cluster management platform to multi-cluster fleet management platform. With DKP 2.5, you can easily move from managing individual clusters to managing your entire fleet of clusters. Many organizations have different clusters run by different teams, and they are unable to consistently manage policy, maintain security, ensure compliance, or monitor overall cost and performance. By seamlessly upgrading your DKP Essential single-cluster environments to a multi-cluster DKP Enterprise environment, you can progress from Kubernetes management to true fleet management, improving consistency, visibility, security, and compliance. DKP 2.5 even enables managing clusters with other distributions, including managed Kubernetes instances such as Amazon EKS, Microsoft AKS, and Google GKE. With just a few simple steps, you can move to a true enterprise fleet.
• Enhanced DKP Insights: DKP Insights is your intelligent copilot that gives you Kubernetes troubleshooting superpowers. It analyzes clusters and ensures that best practices are being followed. It can analyze root causes and spot problems in advance, preventing costly downtime and speeding time to resolution. The platform now includes improved user experience, refined workflows, and validating workloads against the Center for Internet Security's CIS Benchmark to verify that your Kubernetes clusters are running securely.
• Enhanced monitoring, security, and networking with Istio service mesh. DKP 2.5 adds official support for the Istio service mesh in DKP clusters. This gives DKP customers microservice-based observability featuring dependency graphs and service-level monitoring. You can see a "picture" of your microservice dependencies and automatically monitor the "golden signals" to track system health. Istio also can encrypt and secure traffic between services, using mTLS to authenticate each call. 
  

Instant Platform Engineering Eases Kubernetes Management    

As the number of clusters grows, so does the complexity of managing those clusters, making it increasingly difficult to ensure consistency across each cluster. DKP 2.5 gives organizations a ready-to-deploy internal developer platform (IDP) out of the box, which essentially is "instant platform engineering" that provides self-service capabilities by automating best-of-breed open-source components. This establishes consistency and compliance and eases the burden on DevOps teams, enabling them to devote their energies to higher-value tasks rather than wrestling with complex infrastructure issues.  

"As organizations grow their Kubernetes footprints from a single cluster to multiple clusters that are shared between teams across a mix of environments, a consistent approach to Kubernetes management becomes critical." said Tobi Knaup, CEO and co-founder of D2iQ. "DKP is unique in its ability to simplify Kubernetes management through state-of-the-art automation, whether you're standing up your own clusters or using a service like EKS or AKS. At D2iQ, we are committed to delivering a turnkey intelligent platform to help customers realize the true business impact of their cloud-native journeys."

Additional DKP 2.5 enhancements include:

• Support for Rocky Linux. Following Red Hat's announcement of the end of life for CentOS, Rocky Linux is designed to be compatible with upstream CentOS source code. DKP users can now easily deploy and manage their clusters on Rocky Linux, providing flexibility for their infrastructure needs.
• Air-gapped environment management simplified with downloadable documentation. DKP 2.5 solves the problem of accessing documentation in air-gapped environments by providing the option to download DKP documentation from the D2iQ website. This enables customers to save the DKP documentation as a PDF that can be referred to in secure environments without network connections, minimizing risk.  
• Lifecycle management of Microsoft AKS clusters from the DKP user interface.
• Ability to provision DKP on VMware vSphere infrastructure with Ubuntu 20.04 as the OS.