Source: SDxCentral. Original reporting by SDxCentral; summarized and expanded for a DevOps engineering audience.
Hitachi Vantara Picks Up Containership’s Kubernetes IP
Hitachi Vantara has acquired the intellectual property assets of Containership, a Kubernetes startup that shut down operations approximately six months prior to the deal. The acquisition price was not disclosed. Notably, the transaction covers only technology assets — no Containership employees joined Hitachi Vantara as part of the deal.
Bobby Soni, COO of Hitachi Vantara’s Digital Infrastructure Business Unit, announced the acquisition in a company blog post. According to Soni, the core asset is Containership’s Kubernetes Engine — a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-certified Kubernetes distribution designed to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters across major public cloud providers.
What the Containership Kubernetes Engine Offered
The Containership Kubernetes Engine addressed a broad set of operational concerns that DevOps and platform engineering teams commonly face when running Kubernetes at scale. According to Soni’s announcement, the platform’s capabilities included:
- Persistent storage support — enabling stateful workloads in containerized environments
- Centralized authentication and access control — managing identities and permissions across clusters
- Audit logging — tracking cluster activity for compliance and forensics
- Continuous deployment — automating application delivery pipelines
- Workload portability — running workloads consistently across different cloud providers
- Cost analysis — providing visibility into cluster and workload spending
- Autoscaling — dynamically adjusting resources to match demand
- Cluster upgrades — managing Kubernetes version lifecycle with reduced operational friction
Soni noted that Hitachi Vantara already offered infrastructure products incorporating Kubernetes, but framed the acquisition as a deepening of its investment: “Container orchestration is a rapidly evolving market and we continue to invest in solutions that help IT and DevOps teams maximize their infrastructure advantage.”
Integration Plans: Hitachi Enterprise Cloud
Hitachi Vantara indicated that it would incorporate the Containership IP into its product roadmap, though specific details were deferred to future announcements. In a statement to SDxCentral, the company said:
“We expect new offerings based on Containership IP to be highly complementary to Hitachi Enterprise Cloud.”
This positions the Containership technology as an enhancement to Hitachi Vantara’s existing hybrid and on-premises cloud offerings rather than a standalone product.
Background: Hitachi Vantara’s Formation and Strategy
Hitachi Vantara was formed in late 2017 through the consolidation of three Hitachi business units: Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho (a data integration and analytics software business). The combined entity focuses on data services and industrial IoT solutions.
From the start, Hitachi Vantara positioned itself as a complement to — rather than a competitor of — hyperscale cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and AWS. Soni summarized this strategy at the time of formation:
“This is all about standing up end-to-end solutions that can run on-premises or on Azure or Amazon. Our strategy is to bring industrial IoT expertise, our software, and ability to manage and run technology. We don’t think many companies are in a position to pull all those things together.”
The Containership acquisition adds a Kubernetes-native orchestration layer to this hybrid infrastructure strategy.
The Rise and Fall of Containership
Containership was founded in early 2015, originally motivated by a desire to compete in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield. Although it did not win the competition, the founding team proceeded to launch an open source container scheduler and build a commercial business around it.
The company raised $2.6 million in seed funding and positioned its platform as a container deployment management tool, at various points marketing itself as an alternative to Heroku. It expanded cloud support to include Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and bare-metal provider Packet.
Despite these efforts, Containership struggled to find a sustainable revenue model as Kubernetes itself rapidly matured and commoditized the container orchestration layer. The company attempted a significant pivot — re-platforming Containership Cloud to be Kubernetes-native — but failed to generate sufficient commercial traction from the new direction.
Founder and CTO Norman Joyner was candid about the failure in a public blog post at the time of shutdown:
“Ultimately, we came up short. It has been nearly a year and a half since the Containership Cloud re-platform, and we have failed to monetize Containership Cloud in such a way that we could build a sustainable business.”
Containership ceased operations in September 2019, approximately six months before Hitachi Vantara announced the asset acquisition in March 2020.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Engineering Teams
- Hitachi Vantara acquired Containership’s Kubernetes Engine IP to strengthen its hybrid cloud and enterprise Kubernetes offerings.
- The acquired platform was CNCF-certified and covered multi-cloud cluster management, persistent storage, authentication, autoscaling, and continuous deployment.
- The deal included no staff transfers — only technology assets changed hands.
- Hitachi Vantara’s stated strategy remains hybrid: complementing public cloud providers rather than competing with them.
- Containership’s story is a cautionary example of the difficulty of building a commercial business on top of rapidly commoditizing open source infrastructure technology.
This article is based on reporting originally published by SDxCentral in March 2020.