Background: Agile Stacks and HPE’s Kubernetes Strategy

At HPE Discover 2019, Agile Stacks — a company that counts Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) among its investors — announced expanded capabilities for its DevOps automation platform. The announcement coincided with HPE’s own public positioning of Kubernetes as a cornerstone of its hybrid cloud computing strategy, signalling growing industry alignment around container orchestration as the connective tissue between on-premises and cloud environments.

What the Agile Stacks Platform Does

The Agile Stacks platform is designed to automate the creation and management of DevOps pipelines across a wide range of tools and CI/CD platforms. Rather than requiring teams to manually integrate and maintain individual toolchains, Agile Stacks provides a structured framework that orchestrates those integrations automatically.

The platform’s Service Catalog includes more than 80 DevOps tools and platforms, among them:

• CI/CD & Source Control: Jenkins, GitLab, Spinnaker
• Machine Learning Pipelines: Kubeflow
• Container Registry: Harbor
• Object Storage: Minio
• Distributed Storage: Ceph, Portworx

SuperHub: Automating the Automation

At the heart of the Agile Stacks platform is the SuperHub automation hub. SuperHub accelerates software delivery through composable, configurable stacks. Each component within a stack is auto-configured to handle the full lifecycle of a service, including:

• Deploy, upgrade, and rollback
• Promote across environments and clone
• Backup and restore
• Test script generation and functional testing
• Performance testing and vulnerability scanning
• Code merges

The goal, as articulated by Agile Stacks, is to automate the DevOps automation itself — essentially removing the manual configuration overhead that grows as organisations add more tools and platforms to their delivery pipelines.

Addressing Tool Sprawl with a GitOps Framework

One of the persistent challenges in mature DevOps environments is tool sprawl. Organisations that have adopted best practices rarely standardise on a single vendor’s toolchain — they assemble purpose-fit tools from multiple vendors. This creates isolated silos of automation that can conflict, duplicate effort, or simply fail to share state.

Agile Stacks addresses this with an extensible GitOps framework that integrates heterogeneous toolchains under a single operational model. Because the framework is GitOps-based, infrastructure and pipeline configuration is version-controlled and auditable — a practical advantage as DevOps processes evolve and team membership changes over time.

Hybrid Cloud Complexity and Cloud Cost Visibility

Hybrid cloud adoption — driven in significant part by the maturation and widespread uptake of Kubernetes — introduces additional operational complexity. Most organisations want to run workloads across multiple public clouds and their existing on-premises infrastructure simultaneously, but the DevOps processes for each platform tend to be fragmented rather than unified.

Agile Stacks positions SuperHub as a tool to unify these processes across platforms. Beyond pipeline orchestration, SuperHub also supports automated cloud tagging — enabling teams to maintain better visibility into cloud spending by systematically labelling resources at provisioning time, rather than trying to retrofit tagging policies after the fact.

Lowering the Barrier to DevOps Adoption

Agile Stacks also stated an intent to make DevOps more broadly accessible by reducing the initial complexity that discourages adoption. Most organisations still struggle to automate software delivery reliably on a single platform. By abstracting toolchain integration through a composable, catalogue-driven model, the platform aims to let teams start with a working, opinionated baseline rather than building integration logic from scratch.

As hybrid cloud becomes a standard rather than an exceptional architecture, the pressure on engineering teams to implement consistent, enterprise-wide DevOps processes will only increase. Platforms like Agile Stacks represent one approach to managing that complexity — centralising orchestration while preserving the flexibility to adopt new tools as the ecosystem evolves.

Key Takeaways

• Agile Stacks announced expanded platform capabilities at HPE Discover 2019, backed by HPE investment.
• The platform’s SuperHub hub orchestrates composable DevOps stacks across more than 80 integrated tools.
• An extensible GitOps framework addresses tool sprawl in multi-vendor DevOps environments.
• Automated cloud tagging via SuperHub helps organisations track and control cloud spend.
• The platform targets both mature DevOps teams dealing with hybrid cloud complexity and organisations earlier in their DevOps journey.

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.