Unless you've been hiding under a rock in the IT world, you know Kubernetes, the container orchestration program of choice, is hotter than hot. Everyone's using it, adding on to it, offering it as a service, the list goes on and on. But VMware wants you to know that, if all you want is Kubernetes without all the fancy trimmings, well, it can give you that, too, with VMware Essential PKS.
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PKS includes upstream Kubernetes; reference architectures to inform design decisions; and expert support to proactively guide you through upgrades or maintenance and help you troubleshoot it if you need a hand. That's all. That's it.
If that sounds familiar, well it should. Last November, VMware acquired Heptio. This company, which was founded by two Kubernetes creators, Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, used essentially this business model. Indeed, you could argue, that VMware Essential PKS is just a new coat of paint on Heptio's previous offerings.
VMware, which has every intention of being the leading enabler of Kubernetes and cloud native programming, will now offer three different approaches to running Kubernetes in production. These are:
So, no matter how your company plans to deploy Kubernetes, VMware wants to be there. VMware could have treated Kubernetes as a threat. After all, VMware made its billions on the older virtual machine (VM) technology. VMware isn't doing that.
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Instead, as Paul Fazzone, VMware's GM of Cloud Native Applications, blogged, "The message to our customers should be clear: regardless of where you are in your cloud native journey, VMware can help. More than 80 percent of containers run on virtual machines (VMs), and that percentage is only growing year over year. Of course, being VMware, we have vast experience with VMs, so we're uniquely positioned to get you up and running on Kubernetes."