Kubernetes Arrives in New Flavors

Kubernetes has taken center stage in recent days, and, as we’ve been noting in recent posts, the open source container cluster manager is heading in new directions. Google has just announced the release of Kubernetes 1.4, which makes the tool much easier to install.

Meanwhile, Canonical has now launched its own distribution of Kubernetes, with enterprise support, across a range of public clouds and private infrastructure. It's Kubernetes at the core, but features a number of extra bells and whistles.

In announcing Kubernetes 1.4, Google noted:

"One of our top user requests has been making Kubernetes itself easier to install and use. We’ve taken that feedback to heart, and 1.4 has several major improvements...

Kubernetes 1.4 introduces ‘kubeadm’ which reduces bootstrapping to two commands, with no complex scripts involved. Once kubernetes is installed, kubeadm init starts the master while kubeadm join joins the nodes to the cluster.

Installation is also streamlined by packaging Kubernetes with its dependencies, for most major Linux distributions including Red Hat and Ubuntu Xenial. This means users can now install Kubernetes using familiar tools such as apt-get and yum.

Add-on deployments, such as for an overlay network, can be reduced to one command by using a DaemonSet.

Enabling this simplicity is a new certificates API and its use for kubelet TLS bootstrap, as well as a new discovery API.

Many cloud-native applications are built to run in containers, but some existing applications need additional features to make it easy to adopt containers. Often, these include stateful applications such as batch processing, databases and key-value stores. In Kubernetes 1.4, Google has introduced a number of features for simplifying the deployment of such applications. For example, ScheduledJob is introduced so that users can run batch jobs at regular intervals.

Google will have a big presence at the upcoming user conference KubeCon, focused on Kubernetes.

As for Canonical, its Kubernetes distribution adds operational and support tooling, but is otherwise a standard version of the Kubernetes experience, tracking upstream releases closely, 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,” Canonical reports.

Canonical’s distribution enables customers to operate and scale enterprise Kubernetes clusters on demand. You can find out more here, and if you want to get to know how to use Kubernetes, see our post here.