When a company’s technology is used by the White House, the Vatican, the Federal Reserve, and the Bank of England, the computing infrastructure behind it had better work.

This is the challenge faced every day by Bloomberg LP, the financial, software, data and media company. And what many people may not know is that the firm has relied significantly on Kubernetes as an important ingredient for its success.

“For us, Kubernetes is becoming a standardized compute fabric,” said Andrey Rybka (pictured), head of compute architecture, CTO Office, at Bloomberg. “We’ve now got 80 to 100 clusters running. I would say it’s one of the most reliable environments that we have.”

Rybka spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren) during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego, California. They discussed the initial evaluation and deployment of Kubernetes within the company, the role of containers in multicloud solutions, and becoming a provider of managed services within the organization (see the full interview with transcript here).

Risky bet pays off

Bloomberg’s journey to the Kubernetes platform began in 2015, according to Rybka, when the company was evaluating the use of container technology.

“It was risky, but also a safe bet because there was some good computer science and engineering behind the product,” Rybka said.

The ability of the Kubernetes platform to deliver a wide range of services for developers was a prime attraction.

“You need other concepts to be there, and Kubernetes delivered that for us,” Rybka said. “More importantly, it delivered a multicloud strategy, almost accidentally, because none of the cloud providers have any standard APIs of any sort. In Kubernetes, more or less, that becomes a solved problem.”

The implementation of containerized solutions within Bloomberg has also changed the services its able to deliver in-house — such as Bloomberg’s Data Science Platform for the company’s machine learning engineers — for application developers within the company.

“Developers want the same things that they see in the public cloud,” Rybka explained. “When I joined Bloomberg six years ago, one of the things we wanted to do was offer public cloud-like services on-premises. Now we are there; we actually have a lot of managed offerings.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE