Canonical Rolls Out its Own Kubernetes Distribution
As we’ve been noting in recent posts, Kubernetes, the open source container cluster manager originally designed by Google, is becoming a phenomenon. Canonical has now launched a distribution of Kubernetes, with enterprise support, across a range of public clouds and private infrastructure.
“Companies moving to hyper-elastic container operations have asked for a pure Kubernetes on Ubuntu with enterprise support” said Dustin Kirkland, who leads Canonical’s platform products. “Our focus is operational simplicity while delivering robust security, elasticity and compatibility with the Kubernetes standard across all public and private infrastructure.”
Hybrid cloud operations are spreading out as organizations use public clouds alongside private infrastructure. Apps running on Canonical’s distribution of Kubernetes run on Google Compute Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and on-premise with OpenStack, VMware or bare metal provisioned by MAAS. Canonical says that it will support deployments on private and public infrastructure equally.
The distribution adds operational and support tooling, but is otherwise a standard version of the Kubernetes experience, tracking upstream releases closely, says Canonical. Rather than create its own PAAS, the company has chosen to offer a standard Kubernetes base as an open and extensible platform for innovation from a growing list of vendors. “The ability to target the standard Kubernetes APIs with consistent behaviour across multiple clouds and private infrastructure makes this distribution ideal for corporate workgroups in a hybrid cloud environment,” said Kirkland.
Canonical’s distribution enables customers to operate and scale enterprise Kubernetes clusters on demand.
“Model-driven operations under the hood enable reuse and collaboration of operations expertise” said Stefan Johansson, who leads ISV partnerships at Canonical. “Rather than have a dedicated team of ops writing their own automation, our partners and customers share and contribute to open source operations code.”
Canonical’s Kubernetes charms also encode the best practices of cluster management, elastic scaling, and platform upgrades, independent of the underlying cloud. “Developing the operational code together with the application code in the open source upstream Kubernetes repository enables devops to track fast-moving K8s requirements and collaborate to deliver enterprise-grade infrastructure automation”, said Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical.
The bottom line is that Canonical's moves with Kubernetes will make it a stronger player in the orchestration space.
Meanwhile, Mirantis, focused on OpenStack, has announced a new initiative that integrates Kubernetes with OpenStack, letting developers deploy containers on OpenStack in what the company claims takes only minutes. The integration gives developers immediate access to Kubernetes clusters with Docker containers without needing to set up infrastructure. According to Mirantis, developers will be able to seamlessly move entire environments between OpenStack private clouds and public clouds that support Kubernetes, such as Google Cloud Platform.
Find out more about the partnership between Mirantis and Google here.