Use Case
Automotive Manufacturer

A global automotive manufacturer was modernizing both its customer-facing applications and in-vehicle services. With workloads now split between legacy VM infrastructure and new Kubernetes clusters, the platform team faced inconsistent tooling for managing data services. Their PostgreSQL and Redis instances were managed manually or tied to specific environments, creating delays and operational overhead.

To streamline operations, the company adopted production-ready services from the a9s Data Service Bundle, deploying automated a9s PostgreSQL and a9s KeyValue (to replace Redis; based on the open-source Valkey) on VMs. These services delivered backup automation, observability, and security out of the box.

But the real complexity came from managing these services across two infrastructures to solve the hybrid disconnect, they deployed Klutch. Klutch unified the developer experience by bridging the operational divide between environments. It enabled self-service provisioning and full lifecycle automation for VM-based databases from within Kubernetes, solving the fragmentation problem that initially slowed them down.

Since many of their applications were now running in Kubernetes, they use Klutch to integrate the VM-based data services into their Kubernetes platform. Klutch acts as the abstraction layer, enabling self-service provisioning and lifecycle management of data services from within their K8s environments.

Provisioning times dropped by over 70%, and the platform team no longer needed to maintain parallel automation pipelines for each infrastructure. Developers could consume services through a Kubernetes-native interface while benefiting from the resilience, performance, security features, and built-in operational automation of VM-based databases. Klutch ensures consistent governance and observability across clusters, while their chosen a9s Data Services provide automated backups, versioning, and compliance-ready configurations out of the box to help both application development and platform teams move faster with less risk.