Originally reported on devops.com, June 2019. Source article covers announcements made at HPE Discover 2019.
Overview
Agile Stacks announced at the HPE Discover 2019 conference that it was expanding its DevOps automation platform to support Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Red Hat OpenShift — the Kubernetes distribution — alongside its existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS). The move positions the company to help enterprises manage DevOps pipelines across heterogeneous, hybrid cloud environments from a single control plane.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), an investor in Agile Stacks, used the same conference to outline how Kubernetes sits at the center of its own evolving hybrid cloud strategy — making the timing of the announcement strategically significant.
What the Agile Stacks Platform Does
According to company CEO John Mathon, the Agile Stacks platform provides a framework for automating the creation of DevOps pipelines across multiple tools and CI/CD platforms. Key capabilities include:
- Service Catalog: More than 80 DevOps tools and platforms available out of the box, including Kubeflow, Jenkins, GitLab, Spinnaker, Harbor, Minio, Ceph, and Portworx.
- Composable Stacks: DevOps teams configure custom stacks from catalog components. Each component is auto-configured to handle deployment, upgrades, rollbacks, promotions, cloning, backups, test-script generation, merges, performance testing, vulnerability scanning, and functional testing.
- GitOps Framework: An extensible GitOps-based integration layer ties together tools from multiple vendors, reducing the automation silos that typically emerge when organizations adopt best-of-breed tooling.
- Automated Cloud Tagging: Cost visibility across clouds is improved through automated cloud tagging applied via the SuperHub, helping teams track cloud spending without manual overhead.
The SuperHub: Automating DevOps Automation
At the core of the platform is the SuperHub automation hub. Rather than requiring DevOps engineers to wire together individual tools manually, SuperHub orchestrates the entire pipeline lifecycle — from initial provisioning through ongoing operations — using composable, version-controlled stack definitions.
Mathon described the product philosophy as “automating the DevOps automation.” Organizations that have matured their DevOps practices typically accumulate tools from multiple vendors. Without a unifying layer, those tools create isolated automation islands that can work at cross-purposes. The SuperHub and its GitOps framework are designed to resolve that fragmentation, allowing tooling choices to evolve as organizational DevOps maturity improves.
Addressing Hybrid Cloud Complexity
The multi-cloud expansion reflects a broader industry reality: as Kubernetes adoption accelerates, organizations increasingly want to run workloads across public clouds and on-premises infrastructure simultaneously. However, each platform carries its own DevOps tooling assumptions and operational patterns, which compounds complexity for platform and DevOps engineering teams.
Mathon argued that hybrid cloud adoption will ultimately push many organizations to standardize DevOps practices enterprise-wide — something that is difficult to achieve without a platform layer that abstracts away provider-specific differences. Agile Stacks positions its platform as that abstraction layer, enabling consistent pipeline behavior whether workloads run on AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenShift, or on-premises Kubernetes clusters.
Lowering the Barrier to DevOps Adoption
Beyond serving mature DevOps organizations, Mathon noted that Agile Stacks aims to reduce the initial complexity that prevents less experienced teams from adopting DevOps practices at all. By providing pre-integrated, auto-configured stacks through a service catalog, teams can get functional pipelines running without deep expertise in every individual tool.
This is particularly relevant for enterprises that are simultaneously navigating their first hybrid cloud deployments and trying to establish consistent delivery practices — two challenges that, when tackled together, can be overwhelming without appropriate tooling.
Key Takeaways
- Agile Stacks extended its platform to GCP, Azure, and Red Hat OpenShift in June 2019, adding to existing AWS support.
- The SuperHub automation hub uses composable, GitOps-managed stacks to orchestrate end-to-end DevOps pipelines.
- A service catalog of 80+ tools — including Jenkins, GitLab, Spinnaker, and Kubeflow — is available out of the box.
- Automated cloud tagging through SuperHub provides cost tracking across multi-cloud environments.
- The platform targets both DevOps-mature organizations struggling with tool fragmentation and newer adopters facing initial setup complexity.
- HPE is an investor in Agile Stacks and is aligning its own hybrid cloud strategy around Kubernetes.