Canonical Releases ‘Core’ Kubernetes Container Distribution

Canonical is offering a ‘core’ distribution of Kubernetes to customers who want the flexibility of a purer version of the open source container manager.

Google ceded control of Kubernetes last year to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in partnership with the Linux Foundation and its supporters include Cisco, eBay, Huawei, IBM and Intel.

Canonical already offers a managed distribution of Kubernetes but claimed there is significant demand for a standard iteration that affords greater flexibility and scalability but with enterprise support.

Canonical Kubernetes

With the new distribution, customers can operate and run Kubernetes clusters anywhere, with apps running on Google Compute Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and on-premise with OpenStack, VMware or bare metal.

“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.

“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.”

The Ubuntu creator provides all the updates from the CNCF-led project, along with enterprise support, analytics, and its own Kubernetes charms for cluster management, scaling and upgrades. Canonical Kubernetes comes with Prometheus for monitoring, Ceph for storage and a fully integrated Elastic stack including Kibana for analysis and visualisations.

A beta is available now and Canonical Kubernetes will be generally available in the next few weeks.

Google may have handed over control but it is still a driving force behind the platform as it seeks to win over the public cloud market. One of the biggest problems was using Kubernetes in Openstack deployments.

To remedy this, Google teamed up with Mirantis and Intel to make Fuel, Mirantis’ own OpenStack management software, capable of using Kubernetes as its underlying orchestration engine.

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