Companies operating in the Kubernetes space could be forgiven if they mistakenly thought they had signed up for the circus instead.

The pace of major Kubernetes releases, currently clicking along at about once every three months, is translating into a fairly intense juggling act on the part of companies providing ancillary services and support for the popular container orchestration tool.

Just last week VMware Inc. announced version 1.4 of Enterprise Pivotal Container Service, or PKS, as part of a joint effort with Pivotal Software Inc. Another PKS beta version now supports Windows and should be released later this year.

“This is currently like juggling flaming chainsaws,” said Chad Sakac (pictured), senior vice president of Pivotal Container Service and Dell Tech Alliance at Pivotal. “How do we make contributions to the native upstream community and lead that charge, be a good citizen of that ecosystem? We will make Enterprise PKS and Essential PKS the best, simplest curated way to make this work.”

Sakac spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Tech World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the common objectives driving Pivotal’s work with other companies, and VMware’s newly announced partnership with Microsoft Corp (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Customers want a simpler stack

Prior to the release of version 1.4, VMware added support for Microsoft Azure and more security for PKS. The enhancements were part of both VMware’s and Pivotal’s intent to address customer needs.

“With every customer that I see, they’re looking for things that only the giants in increasingly vertically integrated stacks can do,” Sakac said. “Our efforts, between Pivotal and VMware in the Kubernetes universe are singular. The objective is to make that whole stack simple to deploy, consume, grow.”

Microsoft’s relationship with VMware took on new meaning this week when both companies announced a partnership to bring VMware’s infrastructure management software to Azure.

“I thought it was a pretty big deal to see Microsoft join what VMware has been doing with AWS,” Sakac said. “We’re moving into a phase where customers wanting an outcome are going to look at Dell Tech, Microsoft, Amazon, sometimes Google and say: ‘Tell us how we bring ourselves to the digital future.’”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Tech World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither the sponsors of select segments of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE