Cloud-Native Technologies That Made an Impression at KubeCon EU 2018

Myriad vendors are using the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 event running May 2-4 in Copenhagen, Denmark, to make product announcements. Among those vendors is Google, which was the original author of Kubernetes, prior to contributing the effort to become the founding project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2015. Google announced at the event its new Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring service and gVisor container sandboxing technology. Cisco announced that it too is working on improving container visibility by extending its AppDynamics offering to support Kubernetes. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the product announcements made at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, which has attracted more than 4,000 attendees.

Cisco announced that with version 4.9, its CloudCenter now enables organizations to deploy and run applications on Kubernetes. Going a step further, Cisco also announced Kubernetes support for its AppDynamics application visibility technology. “The Kubernetes platform has emerged as the de facto container solution as customers accelerate adoption of containerized application architectures,” Kip Compton, vice president of the Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group, stated. “With our latest Kubernetes support, customers can now easily adopt production-grade Kubernetes across multicloud environments.”

Google made a series of announcements at KubeCon that extend its cloud efforts. Among the new efforts is the Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring service that pulls in logs and metrics. Google also announced that it is open-sourcing its gVisor container sandboxing technology to help improve container security and isolation. In addition, Google announced that its Cloud Security Command Center can now integrate with third-party container security vendor technologies.

Oracle announced new capabilities for its Container Engine for Kubernetes offering. Among the new features are enhanced Identity and Access Management (IAM) control policies. The Oracle-sponsored open-source Fn serverless project also made news at KubeCon, announcing support for emerging open serverless standards.

Rancher Labs announced version 2.0 of its platform, which provides an enterprise-grade platform for multicloud Kubernetes cluster management. “When we started development on Rancher 2.0, we set out to build a single platform that would manage Kubernetes everywhere, whether we deployed it or not,” Sheng Liang, CEO and co-founder of Rancher Labs, said. “We are more confident than ever that containers and Kubernetes will enable a new era of application portability, and strongly believe Rancher 2.0 will accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes in many organizations.”

StorageOS announced at KubeCon the general availability of its software-defined storage platform for container applications. “DevOps and containers are growing at an unprecedented rate, but without persistent storage for container environments, enterprises are stuck using legacy tools and cannot adopt agile, cloud-native technology like Kubernetes, OpenShift or Docker,” Chris Brandon, CEO at StorageOS, said.

Red Hat announced the launch of the open-source Operator Framework at KubeCon. The goal of the Operator Framework is to make it easier for applications to run on top of Kubernetes.

Cloud platform provider DigitalOcean announced its Kubernetes platform and provided developers with access ahead of general availability, which is planned by the end of the year. “Over the last year, Kubernetes has emerged as the container orchestration platform of choice, and as one of the leading public clouds, investing in supporting our customers’ adoption of containers was a natural evolution to our roadmap,” DigitalOcean Vice President of Product Shiven Ramji stated.

Bitnami made a pair of announcements at KubeCon, including the 1.0 releases of its Kubeless and Kubeapps offerings. Kubeless is a serverless platform that enables organizations to deploy a functions as a service (FaaS) on-premises, while Kubeapps provides a Kubernetes application console. “Our goal is to make Kubeapps the de facto standard for discovering and launching applications on Kubernetes,” Sebastien Goasguen, senior director of cloud technologies at Bitnami, stated. “With this new version, Kubeapps is truly package agnostic, providing a common experience for launching anything from Helm charts to serverless functions as well as service instances coming from a Public Cloud Service Broker.”