Our News Bits is a roundup that typically covers news pieces that are just small in content, not in impact. This gives content room to breath even if it comes in less than what we normally cover. At KubeCon in Austin, Texas, where StorageReview was onsite, there were several announcements that either small or would potentially get wiped out by some of the larger announcements so we have collected them here. Announcements come from companies such as Tigera, DriveScale, Pivatol, Oracle, and CoreOS.
Our News Bits is a roundup that typically covers news pieces that are just small in content, not in impact. This gives content room to breath even if it comes in less than what we normally cover. At KubeCon in Austin, Texas, where StorageReview was onsite, there were several announcements that either small or would potentially get wiped out by some of the larger announcements so we have collected them here. Announcements come from companies such as Tigera, DriveScale, Pivatol, Oracle, and CoreOS.
Tigera Announces CNX
Tigera announced the industry’s first secure application connectivity solution designed for the dynamism of cloud native workloads, Tigera CNX. Highlights include:
- Zero Trust Security : CNX’s unique ZT-AuthTM technology enables organizations to move towards a Zero Trust approach to application connectivity, with multiple levels of policy enforcement and encryption enabling maximum security that is independent of the underlying network infrastructure.
- Cloud Native Architecture : CNX is the first secure application connectivity solution designed from the ground-up for cloud native environments, including multi-cloud deployments, while also protecting legacy applications running on virtual machines and bare metal hosts.
- Enterprise Control and Compliance : CNX provides the hierarchical, access-controlled policy controls required to integrate with existing organizational processes and meet internal and external compliance requirements.
- Operational Simplicity : CNX turns the complex, opaque, overlay-based Software Defined Network (SDN) model of network virtualization and security on its head. CNX leverages a simple, flat IP networking model and proven kernel routing features for optimal reliability and visibility, with powerful operational tools required for rapid problem diagnosis and resolution.
CNX is expected to be available this month.
DriveScale Extends Support to Kubernetes & Docker
DriveScale announced that it would be extending the support of it FlexVolume plug-in to Kubernetes and Docker, thus providing persistent storage for container environments. Benefits of the plug-in include:
- Improved Performance and Availability
- No data replication when physical servers fail
- Automatically adjust resources between silos without impact
- Server upgrade/maintenance without impact
- Failure Resiliency
- Reduce recovery time from hours to minutes
- Transparent to applications running on the container
- Preserve Data Locality and Performance
- Increased Infrastructure Efficiency
- Optimize Compute to Disk ratio based on workflow demands
- Redistribute compute resources as needed to meet response time needs of specific applications
The support for the FlexVolume plug-in is available now.
Pivatol Releases PCF 2.0
Pivatol announced the release of version 2.0 of its Pivatol Cloud Foundation (PCF). Version 2.0 comes with many features including those around Kubernetes and containers, the new features include:
- New serverless computing product called Pivotal Function Service
- General availability of Google/VMware Kubernetes container product
- Launch of new “Apple App Store-esque” PCF marketplace featuring GitHub, Splunk, New Relic, and hundreds more.
- First-class support for Windows Server 2016 containers. Customers running applications built with Microsoft’s .NET Framework gain access to container features similar to those used in Linux systems. Many PCF features (e.g., CPU autoscaling) now “just work” for .NET applications on Windows.
- Comprehensive security. InfoSec teams can protect customer data better with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. The platform reduces the risk posed by manual practices. Instead, Pivotal customers use an automated “3 R’s approach.” Repair systems quickly, repave environments often, and regularly rotate credentials.
- Network management and security. Integration with VMware NSX-T to help IT administrators manage the container service on their corporate networks. Network administrators can use PCF and NSX-T from VMware to create a common operational model for cloud-native and traditional apps. This helps enterprises create and enforce network access policies across their entire organization.
PCF 2.0 is available now.
Oracle Open Sources Its Fn Project
Oracle announced that it has open sourced its Fn project Kubernetes Installer and Global Multi-Cluster Management. The Fn project allows developers to leverage serverless capabilities on any Kubernetes environment, including Oracle Container Engine Cloud Service. The Global Multi-Cluster Management is a new set of distributed cluster management features for Kubernetes federation that intelligently manages planet scale applications that are hybrid, multi-region and multi-cloud. Open sourcing these two resources can help drive container adoption.
CoreOS Announces Tectonic 1.8
CoreOS announced the latest version of its enterprise Kubernetes platform, Tectonic 1.8. The latest release includes:
- Pure upstream open source Kubernetes 1.8: Tectonic is always built on a foundation of upstream Kubernetes code with no forks or custom patches, so customers can deploy with confidence. Kubernetes 1.8 delivers important improvements in security, auditing, application management, and more.
- Open Cloud Services Catalog beta: Software services are made available to Tectonic users on demand and in their own environment and are not limited to any single compute platform. They maintain and automate maintenance tasks such as regular, one-click, zero-downtime updates, disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, and more.
- etcd Open Cloud Service: Provides application developers with free, automatically managed etcd clusters for use in their technology stacks. Now it’s easier to use etcd to build modern distributed systems.
- Prometheus Open Cloud Service: Provides an automatically managed and isolated monitoring stack for each of your operations and applications teams.
- Vault Open Cloud Service: CoreOS recognizes Vault is a leading secrets management solution. CoreOS Vault Open Cloud Service is a free service offering that comes in Tectonic’s new Open Cloud Services catalog. It is fully supported, and with a single manifest, users can create a secure, HA Vault service.
- Prometheus 2.0: Tectonic 1.8 bundles the latest version of the preferred monitoring solution for Kubernetes, delivering dramatic performance improvements thanks to a rewritten storage engine.
- Improved container runtime stability and flexibility: Tectonic now manages the installed version of the Docker Engine and updates it automatically to the latest validated release, beginning with Docker 17.03.
Tectonic 1.8 is expected to ship this month.
