Pivotal, VMware team up to deploy Kubernetes on vSphere

Pivotal Container Service provides enterprise Kubernetes atop VMware vSphere and Cloud Foundation in public and private clouds

Pivotal, VMware team up to deploy Kubernetes on vSphere
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Pivotal and VMware have teamed up to deliver commercial-grade Kubernetes distributions on both VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Pivotal Container Service (PKS), launching in Q4 2017, runs Kubernetes atop VMware’s infrastructure management tools—vSphere, vSAN, and NSX. It also taps a project from Cloud Foundry, Kubo, originally created by Pivotal and Google, to deploy and manage Kubernetes on VMware’s stack.

Containerized applications running on such a stack will have access to the services normally available only to VMs in vSphere. For instance, persistent storage for containers can be provided by way of VMware VSAN. It’s also possible to run PKS on VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware’s management system for private clouds running vSphere on either public or private infrastructure.

PKS keeps its version of Kubernetes in sync with the latest version of mainline Kubernetes, which is also the version of Kubernetes used in the Google Container Engine service. VMware notes that this will “provide fast and easy application portability between PKS and GKE,” and allow “PKS users to incorporate innovative GCP services like BigQuery, Spanner, and Machine Learning in their applications.”

For VMware shops not using Google Cloud Platform, keeping Kubernetes in sync is for “ensuring rapid support of features that are released by the Kubernetes community,” according to the PKS FAQ.

Copyright © 2017 IDG Communications, Inc.