Pivotal, VMware & Google Team Up For Enterprise Kubernetes

VMware and Pivotal Software have teamed up to launch Pivotal Container Service (PKS) to help enterprises deploy (and consume) Kubernetes-based container services.

These ‘production-ready’ Kubernetes can operate on either VMware vSphere or the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

PKS features Kubernetes Distribution, which has been built on Kubo, the open source technology created by Pivotal and Google Cloud to give enterprise customers a flexible Container experience, both on-premise and in the Cloud.

Enterprise Kubernetes

The Pivotal Container Service (PKS) is expected to become available in in the fourth quarter of this year, and will come as a standalone product that can integrate with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and VMware’s software-defined data centre (SDDC) infrastructure.

The arrival of PKS comes at a time when development teams increasingly opt for containers as their unit of deployment and therefore require a reliable (and scalable) container orchestration platform such as Kubernetes.

PKS will deliver a hardened container platform, that offers a production-ready environment to satisfy demands for high availability, security, and multi-tenancy across private and public clouds.

The initial release of PKS will feature Kubernetes via BOSH, VMware NSX, and a jointly developed version of Open Services Broker API that allows easy integration of GCP services into PKS applications, said Pivotal.

PKS will be seamlessly integrated with VMware vSphere, enabling customers to use VMware’s unified SDDC infrastructure for containers and VMs, the firm added.

“Acquiring the technical capabilities and the transformative culture associated with modern software companies is a matter of competitive urgency for most enterprises,” said Rob Mee, CEO at Pivotal. “To adapt, organisations need to provide their developers modern application development platforms to enable them to ship code continuously.”

“Pivotal and VMware, in partnership with Google Cloud, bring you Pivotal Container Service, a powerful new way to deploy and operate Kubernetes.

“Pivotal Container Service is a great way to run containers and Kubernetes on premises,” added Sam Ramji, head of Product Management for Developer Platforms at Google Cloud. “It gives you native access to Google Cloud services, and it’s on the same release cadence as Google Container Engine.”

Containerised Apps

PKS is expected to become available in later this year, when pricing will also be revealed.

Kubernetes  is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications. In July Kubernetes 1.7 was made generally available.

The Kubernetes project was first developed by Google and has been an open-source project run by the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ever since July 2015.

Quiz: How much do you know about the cloud?