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The open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system is increasingly becoming a core foundational component that enables the emerging multicloud world.
It’s a world that VMware is positioning itself to take a leading role in, thanks in part to the acquisition of Heptio, a firm that was created by the founders of Kubernetes itself. VMware announced the acquisition in November 2018 and closed the deal a month later. In a video interview with eWEEK, Craig McLuckie, co-founder of Heptio, and Paul Fazzone, senior vice president of cloud-native apps at VMware, detail what is needed to make Kubernetes even more successful and where the future of cloud-native is headed.
“One of the things that brought VMware and Heptio together in the first place was our shared belief and common mission around Kubernetes emerging as the modern top layer for multicloud infrastructure,” Fazzone told eWEEK. “Our teams are thinking about how to preserve the true multicloud nature of Kubernetes and support the community’s efforts to harden and secure it as a true enterprise, production-ready infrastructure layer.”
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that was originally built by Google with a team led by McLuckie and Joe Beda, who left to form Heptio in 2016. Kubernetes in 2019 is supported by all three major public cloud providers—AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GPC)—as well as across multiple on-premises and private cloud vendors.
Fazzone said that a key goal for VMware is to bring a modern look at management, operations, visibility and tooling to Kubernetes.
“So wherever you’re running Kubernetes, it can have the enterprise tools and hooks you need to leverage it as a production tool for your applications,” Fazzone said.
VMware Kubernetes
VMware was no stranger to Kubernetes, even before it acquired Heptio. Among the different VMware offerings that support Kubernetes is the Pivotal Container Service (PKS), which is a joint offering from VMware and Pivotal. PKS 1.3 was released on Jan.16, integrating support for Kubernetes 1.12.
For Heptio, McLuckie said that as part of VMware, his team now benefits from a much larger pool of engineers that will help with the development of Kubernetes-related technology.
The Kubernetes Dial Tone
In terms of what VMware and the broader Kubernetes community need to do to help advance the state of Kubernetes, McLuckie said that Kubernetes needs to become more boring. By boring, the idea is that Kubernetes is stable, reliable technology that just works to enable higher order business value and cloud-native applications.
“Kubernetes needs to fade into the background; it needs to become this ubiquitous dial tone that exists everywhere,” McLuckie said.
Watch the full video interview above.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.