Pivotal Software and VMware, in collaboration with Google Cloud, have unveiled Pivotal Container Service (PKS), a new product that helps enterprises and service providers to deliver Kubernetes on VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with compatibility to Google Container Engine (GKE).
The new offering is expected to become available in calendar Q4 2017, and ship as a standalone product that integrates with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and VMware's software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure.
According to the vendors, software teams that have decided on containers as their unit of deployment need a reliable and scalable container orchestration platform such as Kubernetes.
PKS is intended to help operations teams deliver a hardened, maintainable container platform, while giving developers on-demand access to a production-ready environment featuring high availability, security, and multi-tenancy across private and public clouds.
In November 2016, Pivotal and Google Cloud partnered on Kubo, a joint engineering effort to bring the multi-cloud deployment capabilities of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (via BOSH) to Kubernetes clusters and provide a uniform way to instantiate, deploy, and manage highly-available Kubernetes clusters on any cloud. PKS is a commercial release of the open source Kubo technology to help Global 2000 companies operationalize Kubernetes.
VMware has teamed up with Pivotal and Google Cloud, and says it is committing significant R&D resources to jointly develop Kubo and build solutions on top of it that enhance the operational readiness of Kubernetes.
The initial release of PKS will feature Kubernetes via BOSH, VMware NSX, and a jointly developed version of Open Services Broker API that allows integration of GCP services into PKS applications. PKS will feature cross-cloud security and network connectivity including container network interface (CNI) compatible services powered by NSX. PKS will be seamlessly integrated with VMware vSphere, enabling customers to use VMware's unified SDDC infrastructure for containers and VMs.
Moreover, the companies say, a critical benefit for enterprise customers will be PKS' constant compatibility to Google Container Engine (GKE), which is continuously powered by the latest Kubernetes release and features a fully managed experience backed by Google SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), and deep integration with VMware infrastructure and management.
Fully supported by Pivotal and VMware, PKS will be best suited for large- to mid-sized enterprises as well as service providers. Pivotal and VMware will both sell the product directly, via their respective channels, and via the VMware Cloud Provider partner program.
PKS will also be brought to market by Dell EMC on VxRail Appliances and VxRack Systems, which offer a foundation of hyper-converged infrastructure and data protection.