X
Innovation

​Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime released

Want a trustworthy, full-featured Kubernetes package that's not tied to a specific vendor? Then you should talk to Bitnami.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

If you want to use a safe third-party container, smart people know they should turn to Bitnami. This company packages, deploys, and maintains applications in virtually any format for any platform. Now, at KubeCon in Seattle, Bitnami announced its Kubernetes release: Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR) 1.0, a production-ready open source project.

So, with everyone and their cloud provider offering Kubernetes, why should you care? Well, first, BKPR provides built-in monitoring, alerting, and metrics automatically, thereby enabling developers to avoid reinventing the wheel when they rollout a Kubernetes application.

Also: Kubernetes' first major security hole discovered

erica-brescia.jpg
​Erica Brescia

BKPR, Erica Brescia. Bitnami COO and co-founder claimed, provides "an additional layer of functionality beyond the bare cluster and automatically configures itself to work on whichever cloud on which it is deployed. It manages and maintains a Bitnami-curated stack of open-source software to run applications on Kubernetes in production"

What that means for their customers is it removes the need for developers to find and install all of the standard Kubernetes programs. BKPR includes Prometheus for monitoring, Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana for logging, as well as cert-manager, oauth2-proxy, and Nginx for ingress. If you need it, BKPR also offers automatic publishing of endpoints on DNS and TLS termination including automatic and managed issuing of X.509 certificates.

That's important, added Bitnami VP of product Simon Bennett, because while there are "many ways to install vanilla Kubernetes, to solve real business problems you need many other programs to make a Kubernetes cluster really useful." In addition, by including these programs in from the start you don't have the pain of bolting them on afterwards.

"We created the BKPR open project because we saw Kubernetes users addressing the same problems over and over in slightly different ways, which in turn resulted in app developers having to accommodate those different solutions over and over again," said Bitnami VP of Engineering Rick Spencer in a statement.

He added: "BKPR simplifies the set up process of all of this necessary tooling in your cluster. It removes common requirements and makes it easy to install on different platforms, from the same application pipeline, while also allowing cluster operators all of the configurability they need for their specific use cases."


MUST READ


The open-source Apache licensed BKPR is designed for ease of use with platform-neutral specifications. To do this, it uses a standard Kubernetes manifest for every platform. If you want, you can also use the kubeprod installer tool.

BKPR, in a turn, is a key piece of the Bitnami Application Pipeline. The Pipeline enables you to to speed up delivering features to multiple clouds by using Bitnami virtual machine (VM), container, or Helm packaged applications.

So, if you want a ready-to-run Kubernetes package that you can run on any server or cloud, check out BKPR. You'll be glad you did.

Cloud services: 24 lesser-known web services your business needs to try

Related Stories:

Editorial standards