KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025 | Venkat Ramakrishnan, Pure Storage & Steve Lewis, HSBC

Clips
More from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025

Venkat Ramakrishnan

President and COO

NeuBird AI

Steve Lewis

Global Head of Engineering, Container Platforms

HSBC

play_circle_outline HSBC's use of Kubernetes for optimization and value

play_circle_outline Challenges and benefits of implementing Portworx for data management in Kubernetes

play_circle_outline Empowering Data-Intensive Apps with Portworx's Automation, Disaster Recovery, and Cyber Resiliency Features

play_circle_outline Importance of continued upgrades and maintenance in large Kubernetes environments

Info
Transcript

Venkat Ramakrishnan, Pure Storage & Steve Lewis, HSBC

Venkat Ramakrishnan

President and COO NeuBird AI

Steve Lewis

Global Head of Engineering, Container Platforms HSBC

Join Venkat Ramakrishnan of Pure Storage, general manager of the Portworx business unit, and Steve Lewis of HSBC, global lead for container platforms engineering, as they engage in an insightful discussion during KubeCon EU 2025 in London. This conversation offers a closer look at Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies and their impact on modern businesses.

In this video, Ramakrishnan and Lewis share their expertise on Kubernetes platform innovations and the roles of Pure Storage and HSBC in the ever-evolving technology landscape. Hosted by theCUBE’s... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What are some reasons why Kubernetes is considered the right technology for HSBC? add

What are some challenges and considerations when trying to connect to storage from a large workload that needs to scale? add

What are some of the challenges organizations face when trying to modernize with Kubernetes and how does Portworx help address these challenges? add

What were some of the results and challenges experienced after the adoption of Kubernetes on bare metal? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Venkat Ramakrishnan, Pure Storage & Steve Lewis, HSBC

search

Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello, and welcome back to the Cube. My name is Paul Nashawaty. We're here on the show floor at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in London, and we're here to talk about a whole slew of things with Pure Storage and Portworx. I'm here today joined by Steve and Venkat. How you doing guys?

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> Hey, Paul. Good to be here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great to have you here. Great to have you back on the show.

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> Absolutely.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's great to have you. Steve, why don't you give the audience a little bit about an introduction of who you are and what you do?

Steve Lewis

>> Sure, yeah. I'm Steve Lewis. I work for HSBC. My role is the Global Lead For Container Platforms Engineering at HSBC. So we're running the internal on-premise container platform services, both a heritage PCF platform and our strategic Kubernetes platform.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So this show is not relevant at all?

Steve Lewis

>> No, not at all. Indeed.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Venkat, why don't you give the audience a little bit about your background?

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> Absolutely. I've been in Cube many times. I'm the GM for the Portworx business unit inside Pure. We are working with customers like Steve and HSBC and a lot of other global 2,000 customers.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, welcome back. We definitely love to have you on the show. It's great. The event, there's a lot happening here. Kubernetes, it's the right technology for a lot of organizations, but it's also a challenge for a lot of organizations. What we see here at the event, whether it was at the keynote or just walking the show floors, there's a ton going on with regards to cloud native, and optimization, and modernization. So Steve, I'm going to jump right into it, why is Kubernetes the right technologies for HSBC?

Steve Lewis

>> Sure. I think, with the optimization resources, trying to get more out of the technology, improving utilization, we're seeing improvements of at least 50%, in terms of the value we get out of the resources we invest in a platform like Kubernetes, compared to traditional technologies. So yeah, it's a way of getting more bang for our bucks. And, yeah, we think 50% more.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So 50% more utilization, optimization? What about that?

Steve Lewis

>> Value, I suppose.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Value.

Steve Lewis

>> Value through a combination of higher utilization and just more cost-efficient. I mean, the platform has less overheads inherently.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So when it comes to that optimization piece, what were you coming from?

Steve Lewis

>> Well, so I guess, the hardware itself, we're exploiting more of the hardware. There's less overhead in the platform. You've only got one OS being shared by multiple containers, instead of multiple copies. And just the management overhead of that, managing multiple copies of an operating system, compared to managing just containers, workloads. And developers are freed up from a lot of that platform overhead. Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely.

Steve Lewis

>> And we run our container platforms, our on-prem container platform as namespaces of service. So we are getting a lot of sharing out of the underlying platform.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And Venkat, modernization is the trend. Not the trend, but it is the top of mind for most CIOs that I talk to. How is Portworx helping with this?

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> Yeah, absolutely. So as you heard what Steve said, what they're trying to do is to go from the legacy-pinned workloads to specific hardware to create a shared services model on which multiple application teams can have a shared platform. So that delivers a lot of cost optimization, a lot more efficiency, and it makes software development a lot more faster. But all of this comes, if you have legacy mindset or legacy process, you cannot really take advantage of the modernization initiatives. Right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> True.

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> So in order for app modernization to work, you have to have a complete self-service model, where developers can build, ship, and run their code everywhere, and then be able to iterate pretty fast on going from dev to production, and back and iterate again. So where Portworx really shines is delivering that kind of self-service capability for all the data-intensive production apps. And there is no real mission-critical app if it doesn't have data. Right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right. Right.

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> And HSBC being a bank, of course they have a lot of mission-critical data, they have a lot of data that needs to be secured. There's a ton of that application that needs to be built on it to serve their internal and external customers. So Portworx enables HSBC, or customers like HSBC, to deliver self-service for the Kubernetes environments, or it automates their entire workflow completely. Doing storage for a few nodes, a few servers, is hard enough. But at the scale someone like HSBC runs is tens of thousands of nodes. And imagine having to deliver services at that scale. So you need to have a sophisticated level of automation in the data management platform, which is what Portworx provides. Right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah.

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> The third important thing is, look, nobody's just been to the data center. Banks like HSBC and others have a presence on multiple data centers, on clouds, potentially. So architecting with Portworx gives them that neutrality, that now they're built on Portworx, and Kubernetes, so they can build and operate it everywhere. So that's kind of how we help the modernization move.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I love the story. I sat through many, as you know, many of briefings with Pure and Portworx. Your value proposition of bridging the gap between old and new is also a very strong value proposition, but absolutely optimizing on the next generation, the new containerization and such. Steve, I want to talk a little bit about some of the applications. Can you give some examples of Kubernetes and what's happening at HSBC with Kubernetes applications and specifics?

Steve Lewis

>> Sure. Sure. On the internal Kubernetes platform that I run, we are hosting something in excess of 600 production services.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Wow.

Steve Lewis

>> Each one have comprised of many applications and workloads. And what's that? That's 13,000 nodes, I think-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Wow....

Steve Lewis

>> on more than 200 clusters. So it's a big operation, including both production and non-production. A good example of one of those, that's really critical to the bank, is our payments systems. We have regulated payments services running in multiple jurisdictions around the world, that payments is considered a nationally critical infrastructure in many jurisdictions.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure.

Steve Lewis

>> And it's very heavily regulated. So we are looking for very high reliability. We cannot take any risks to those platforms. And the throughputs are huge. I mean, we're talking about millions of transactions and trillions of payments. So yeah, it's a very big deal to us. Reliability and integrity of the data, and our ability to survive any kind of incident, and know that the data is intact is absolutely critical.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, of course. And governance, compliance, and regulations makes a lot of sense. But can you double-click down a little bit onto some of the challenges you were faced with? Really, when searching for a new Kubernetes data management platform, what was some of the challenges that you had to overcome before you actually implemented?

Steve Lewis

>> Simplistically, you've got storage and you're trying to connect to the storage from a workload. And for a large workload that needs to be able to scale, we need to rewrite many capabilities. Rewrite once is not enough. Even if we just had one instance of a process, you've got to be able to survive the restart of a process, or the proactive start of another copy. And you've got to be able to retain the integrity of that data through that. So you need to rewrite many. And that was the basic reason we got into Portworx in the first place. But that's just if you like price of entry, it's the basic requirement. Once you've got there, there's more value in the platform itself. So you've got the backup capabilities, the DR capabilities, the replication, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's a platform on which we can build. And importantly, although we use Pure Storage, we're not tied into Pure Storage. So that's also important. We're not tied into a particular flavor of Kubernetes and we're not tied into a particular flavor of storage.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. And so when I hear what you just said, there's a lot of challenges I hear about Kubernetes and such in general. I see the number one thing that organizations are trying to do is modernize. The challenges are basically complexity and skill gap issues. And it sounds like the complexity piece was resolved. I mean, Venkat, do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I know that Portworx is almost, I don't want to call it the big green button, the easy button, but it's pretty easy to do the deployment.

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> Yeah, absolutely. Right? I mean, look, like any customer, HSBC started out as a few hundred nodes. And very quickly they grew to 12,000 nodes. And I just took a selfie with Paul and our account manager. And then Steve, and our carrier account manager, and Paul Brown, our CSM say like, "Look how far we have come in a short time." It is important that when you are a platform, we integrate with the customers' processes. That's the key thing. So a lot of folks have built bespoke or products that for specific use cases, but the customers have to chain their workflows to integrate them.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure.

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> Instead, what we do in Portworx is that we work with the customers' workflow and integrate our product into theirs. So it's easy for them to adopt an operate at scale. Right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Meet the client where they are.

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> Exactly, right? And the fact that we are built as a fully integrated piece of the Kubernetes control plane, we run in the worker nodes, we give a Kubernetes experience to all of the operators and all of the folks who operate the clusters. And the developers also get the complete Kubernetes experience of self-service. So it's easy to deploy and scale as well. Right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, yeah.

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> And we aren't stopping here, we're just getting started. As Steve mentioned about the payment platform, it processes hundreds of trillions of dollars of transaction in a year. And they've only made it available in a few sets of countries, so it's going to be expanded more. And there's more other services. So this is going to continue to expand, and there is a huge movement around, "Hey, how do you run bare metal containers?" I think HSBC's leading the thought on that as well. And I'll let Steve talk more about it.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, Steve, absolutely, I was going to pivot over. I want to ask about the benefits and the results that you saw? You went with Portworx, it was the right choice for your solution, it seemed to move right in the right direction. What was some of the results after the adoption?

Steve Lewis

>> Well, I guess importantly, the performance. We get good performance out of the platform. But as we moved to bare metal, we're seeing even more performance. And there are pressures in the market, should we say, encouraging people to look at bare metal rather than virtualized technology. We use the Google's Anthos, or GDC, on-prem version of Kubernetes. And that runs on both VMware and on bare metal. I think, as we start to push the boundaries, we are starting to experience the pains of growth, the scale. We're talking about thousands of developers, we're talking about hundreds of services, and it's hard work. We're operating namespaces of service. That's a shared platform. We've got challenges. One of our biggest challenges right now is the maintenance of that platform. The constant flow of upgrades. New versions of Kubernetes are coming out every four months, and we've got to keep pace, and we've got to get that upgraded. Normally, a state the size that we have, 200 plus clusters, that's like painting the Forth Road Bridge, it never ends. We are constantly upgrading, maintaining. And I think that's where, for example, one of those value-added services we've been able to leverage from Portworx, is the Portworx backup feature. So one of our challenges is, if we get behind, you've suddenly got this backlog of upgrades and it's starting to build. And it's not just the Kubernetes kind of platform itself, but it's all the ancillary components as well. When you're adding into that, the service mesh and the ingress controller, it starts to become quite a big overhead. Clearing that backlog, Google have made it a little easier. We can now skip a version, but we can't skip multiple versions. And what we are looking at doing now with Portworx is using Portworx backup to leapfrog multiple versions and kind of create a solution for problems that, it's a business problem. We're regulated. We've got to ensure that things are kept up to date. And we've got to be able to catch up. And, yeah, Portworx has got solutions for that.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, and there's table stakes in the industry. There's obviously technologies that can do it. And when you look at Portworx, Portworx adds those above and beyond pieces. And those are the pieces, I think, that really help accelerate the project. Would you agree with that?

Venkat Ramakrishnan

>> Yeah, absolutely. Right? I mean, that's why when Steve mentioned it's a platform, that's just music to my ears. It's one of your top customers really call out what's your value add. Portworx is a complete platform. So we built this, because we started out as a storage for containers, but then we quickly realized customers need automation. So we built things like Stark and Autopilot. Then we realized customers need disaster recovery. So we built the Portworx DR and migrate capabilities, where you can not just do DR, you can do complete stateful app migrations within blue green clusters, on-prem to cloud, cloud back to on-prem, because customers have different changing workflow needs. And then we said, "Okay, you know what? Now as folks were deploying Kubernetes clusters in production, they needed a way to get cyber resiliency for Kubernetes," which is nonexistent when we started out. Because we saw a lot of customers bet their businesses on Kubernetes, and they said, "Let's move with Portworx Backup." So what Portworx Backup does is that it builds a catalog of your entire Kubernetes infrastructure. All of, for example, in Steve's case, the 200 clusters he has. The app bindings, the service bindings, the configurations, all the config maps, and secrets. And then, of course, the data goes along with it. And then it builds a time machine for your Kubernetes cluster. Just, you can continue to snap all of your infrastructure, store it into an object store, catalog it, or even a file back in, and then continue to do that. And then he's able to leverage that to restore it and then migrate workloads within clusters as well.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's fantastic. It sounds like there's a bright future. It sounds like it's the right decision. It sounds like you made the right decision moving to Portworx. I want to thank you both for your time today. This has been great, very insightful. I want to thank the audience for your time watching, and we'll be back.