VMware Introduces Kubernetes as a Service On Photon Platform

by Adam Armstrong October 18, 2016

written by Adam Armstrong October 18, 2016

Today at VMworld Europe 2016 in Barcelona, VMware, Inc. announced built-in support for Kubernetes in VMware Photon Platform, this support will allow the ability to deliver Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS). On top of KaaS, Photon Platform will also be adding networking and storage services powered by VMware NSX and VMware Virtual SAN, making it an end-to-end enterprise cloud-native infrastructure platform.

Last year VMware introduced its Photon Platform. As we said, Photon Platform is purpose-built solution designed to meet this emerging need and features in order to run cloud-native applications at scale. Designated as a technology preview, the VMware Photon Platform is ideal for DevOps teams looking to build out large pools of commodity computing capacity that solely run cloud-native applications. With it, DevOps teams will have the option of open container orchestration frameworks such as Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos and Cloud Foundry to run on the platform. WMware also indicates that this technology will support dynamic continuous integration environments, platform as a service (PaaS) or SaaS deployments, and sizable data analytics clusters running Hadoop or Spark.

As businesses try to set themselves apart, they can leverage the Photon Platform to build and run modern applications including Kubernetes as an on-demand service in their data centers. The platform also helps companies focus on their core business with IT automation. With Photon Platform developers can rapidly provision Kubernetes clusters, containers and virtual machines from a catalog of machine sizes, container and operating system base images managed by IT. The Photon Platform is ideal for organizations specializing in DevOps and organizations moving from public cloud to private cloud.

Photon Platform’s new developer services and broader infrastructure functionality include:

Kubernetes as a Service—VMware Photon Platform will enable IT operations teams to deliver Kubernetes as a Service to developers in a multi-tenant fashion for workload isolation and security. Kubernetes clusters— which can be sized from single node clusters to hundreds of nodes—can be provisioned in minutes with developers being able to scale up their clusters as needed with no down time. The resilient VMware Photon Platform features high availability capabilities such as automatic healing from failures to reduce downtime of Kubernetes services. VMware provides end-to-end support of Photon Platform including a commercially-supported distribution of Kubernetes.
Virtual Networks Powered by VMware NSX—Photon Platform will introduce network services based on the industry leading VMware NSX. Initially, the platform will provide switching and routing services. Over time, the platform will offer a complete set of logical networking elements and services.
Hyper-converged Storage Powered by VMware Virtual SAN—Photon Platform will introduce block storage services featuring the industry-leading VMware Virtual SAN. This new service will offer flexible, programmable and proven persistent storage for containerized and cloud-native applications. The service will deliver elastic storage that scales up and out to enable rapid application deployment. Workloads will benefit from robust data services such as deduplication, stretched clusters, erasure coding and more. Built using a hyper- converged infrastructure model, Photon Platform offers customers a simplified hardware architecture that enables customers to scale-out their server and storage resources incrementally. Photon Platform will also connect to external NAS and SAN arrays.

Availability

VMware Photon Platform is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2016.

VMware Photon Controller at Github

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