Software vendors line up Kubernetes tasting menu for devops

Source – theregister.co.uk

With the advent of KubCon and CloudNativeCon in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday, assorted enterprise vendors have chosen this week to flog their latest devops-oriented wares, before the impending holiday torpor leaves IT folks too distracted, weary or inebriated to care.

In the interest of jargon pruning and hype deflation, we present a few such developments here in brief as a sort of Kubernetes-flavored turducken.

Kubernetes – a nod to Greeks, container-bearing ships, and those who steer them – is the open source container orchestration project that Google in its blinding benevolence, bestowed upon the world. It makes managing masses of software containers somewhat less of a chore than other options, and has been embraced by more or less every enterprise biz with an interest in containers, even public cloud market leader AWS.

Microsoft is crowing about its booming Kubernetes on Azure biz, up 700% in the year to date. Given that its Azure Kubernetes Service – AKS among friends – only launched in October, 2017, that it’s tempting to read that as going from one customer to eight. But doubtless the actual figures are much higher and Redmond’s math incorporates as a baseline the constituency for its Azure Container Service (ACS), christened before the conquest of Kubernetes demanded the AKS rebranding.

As a show of support for Kubernetes, Microsoft on Wednesday said it is open sourcing its Open Service Broker for Azure (OSBA), using the Open Service Broker API, a mutually agreed upon way for companies to expose services to applications on platforms like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry.

OSBA thus makes Azure services manageable through the Kubernetes API. A customer could use it, in conjunction with Kubernetes package manager Helm, to stand up an instance of WordPress atop a Azure Database for MySQL rather than running the database in a container.

Also, Microsoft is contributing an early version of a command line interface for the Kubernetes Service Catalog and is debuting a dashboard and visualization tool for Brigade pipelines called Kashti, which the software giant talked up at the recent Open Source Summit in Prague.

And the best of the rest

Speaking of Helm, Codefresh, a continuous integration/continuous deployment platform for containers, on Monday said it planned to demo support for Helm Charts at KubeCon, with availability shortly thereafter.

CoreOS meanwhile bumped its enterprise Kubernetes platform, Tectonic, to version 1.8 on Tuesday, to keep pace with the Kubernetes 1.8 release that showed up in September. The software includes version 2.0 of the open source Prometheus monitoring software and the Vault cloud-oriented secrets management service.

Application packaging biz Bitnami, debuted a in-cluster application deployment environment called Kubeapps. It’s basically an easy way to launch apps running on a Kubernetes cluster. If you’ve ever created a one-click app on Digital Ocean or another cloud service provider, Kubeapps is outwardly similar.

Red Hat, not to be confused with Reddit, said it will support a handful of application runtimes to develop Java or JavaScript applications on OpenShift, its container application platform based on Docker and Kubernetes. These include: Java EE, WildFly Swarm, Eclipse MicroProfile, Eclipse Vert.x, Node.js, and Spring Boot.

A K-fixated startup called Kasten, sporting a pedigree of former Amazonians, Googlers, and Facebookians, “emerged from stealth” – began seeking attention – with an enterprise-focused Kubernetes platform called K10. Apparently, it’s suppose to make containers coexist better with compliance and business continuity concerns.

The “kompany” – our embellishment, not theirs – also open sourced a framework called Kanister for managing application data on Kubernetes. It could be used, for example, to back up a MongoDB database for disaster recovery.

Pivotal signaled the eventual arrival of version 2.0 of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, its commercial version of the open source Cloud Foundry application platform for businesses. The enterprise software will, the company says, include support for serverless computing through the Pivotal Functions Service. It also comes with the company’s Google/VMware Kubernetes container product, dubbed Pivotal Container Service, and support for Windows Server 2016 containers.