BlueData, provider container-based software for AI and Big Data workloads, will undertake a new open source Kubernetes initiative: BlueK8s.
The company also introduced the first open source project in the BlueK8s initiative, Kubernetes Director (aka KubeDirector), for deploying and managing distributed stateful applications with Kubernetes.
Kubernetes (aka K8s) is now the de facto standard for container orchestration. Kubernetes adoption is accelerating for stateless applications and microservices, and the community is beginning to evolve and mature the capabilities required for stateful applications.
The Kubernetes ecosystem has added building blocks such as Statefulsets – as well as open source projects including the Operator framework, Helm, Kubeflow, Airflow, and others – that have begun to address some of the requirements for packaging, deploying, and managing stateful applications. But there are still significant gaps in the deployment patterns and tooling for complex distributed stateful applications in large-scale enterprise environments.
BlueData is committed to addressing these gaps, to help simplify and streamline the containerized deployment of stateful applications in the enterprise.
The new BlueK8s initiative is focused on bringing enterprise-level capabilities and support for distributed stateful applications to the Kubernetes open source community.
BlueData recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) – the organization behind Kubernetes and other cloud native open source projects – in order to foster collaboration in this area with top developers, end users, and vendors in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
KubeDirector is the first open source BlueK8s project, designed to help with the deployment and management of complex distributed stateful applications on Kubernetes. KubeDirector is a custom controller built using the Kubernetes custom resource definition (CRD) framework that:
- Leverages the native Kubernetes API extensions, design philosophy, and authentication
- Provides native support for preserving application configuration and state
- Prioritizes simplicity, and doesn’t require decomposing applications to fit microservices patterns
- Utilizes an application-agnostic deployment pattern, minimizing the time to onboard stateful applications to Kubernetes
- Supports the deployment of large-scale distributed data pipelines consisting of multiple applications for analytics, business intelligence, ETL, visualization, data science, and ML / DL
“We’re excited to introduce K8s and KubeDirector to the Kubernetes open source community,” said Kumar Sreekanti, co-founder and CEO of BlueData. “Kubernetes is an ideal solution for stateless applications, but there are still challenges in using it for large-scale, distributed stateful applications. We’re pleased to be working with CNCF and the Kubernetes open source community to address these challenges, and incorporate our experience with dozens of enterprise customers deploying large-scale, distributed stateful applications in containerized environments.”
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