Cloud Native Short Takes

Hello everyone, 

Wow – what an exciting time! While I am super energized about all the news in cloud-native land, I always love to see a new generation of VMware’s core stack being released. All hypervisor and management software (vSphere) got a significant update and there are tons of highly interesting updates that could also impact cloud-native platforms running on top of it. Just check out e.g. VMFork that is now part of the core hypervisor in version 6.7 and imagine the possibilities. What is VMFork you ask? VMFork enables “forking” instances of a live, powered-on VM, each with its own unique identity. By leveraging the existing linked-clone technology for disks and extending the hypervisor to enable Copy-on-Write memory and VM state, VMFork fosters instant creation of VMs with little CPU overhead. William Lam already blogged about some examples as well.

But I am just scratching the surface here – learn more about the updates from the linked blogposts below… and now into the content!

The world is gathering in Hannover/Germany this week for the Hannover Messe to discuss Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation across industries. VMware is showcasing some of the solutions at the edge and IoT space as well – find out more in the video on Hannover Messe’s website.

My great colleague Tom Scanlan worked on a slightly smaller IoT & Kubernetes usecase and released a new blog article titled “Winery Application Demo: IoT Pipeline with Kubernetes on vSphere” – great read!

As I mentioned on a previous edition of my updates, there is now a dedicated Special Interest Group (SIG) in the Kubernetes Community that is focussed on VMware. Our colleagues outlined more about the structure, purpose and how to engage with the SIG in a recent blog article. 

William Lam keeps blogging about Pivotal Container Service. This week it’s about a Monitoring Tool Overview – by the way: the Wavefront team also released a blog article on Develop Cloud-Native Applications, Leave the Heavy Lifting of Monitoring to Wavefront which also includes a pretty cool 8 minute demo!

Besides William’s excellent series, my colleague Cormac Hogan also shared a great blogpost around a very simple Pivotal Container Service deployment. 

There is now also a free new ebook on “Accelerating Digital Transformation with Containers and Kubernetes” available from VMware. The book “introduces you to containers and Kubernetes, explains their business value, explores their use cases, and illuminates how they can accelerate your organization’s digital transformation“.

KubeCon is just around the corner. Make sure to add  The NewStack Pancake Breakfast & Podcast: Securing Kubernetes to your schedule! Please reach out if you are attending KubeCon – VMware is a Diamond Sponsor this year and we will have a presence there as well! 

Some additional news and updates:

All vSphere 6.7 release notes & download links

Harbor's stars on Github doubled in a year to 4000+! 79 contributors from 15 countries and thousands of users worldwide. Harbor offers cool features like image replication, vul. scanning & RBAC. It has been used in many products and projects, including PKS, VIC and Dispatch. pic.twitter.com/ecSUJc1b37

— Project Harbor (@project_harbor) April 18, 2018

New vSphere 6.7 APIs worth checking out

New Instant Clone Architecture in vSphere 6.7 – Part 1

• Introducing Developer and Automation Interfaces for vSphere 6.7
• VMware’s Alex Ellis Talks Serverless, OpenFaaS and Open Source at DevNet
• VMware AppDefense Introduces Least Privilege Security for Containerized Applications

Happy Monday everyone!

Another exciting week has passed and I had several great meetings across the region. And I love my new PKS socks – socks are the new stickers 😉

But lets take a look at some of the content from last week:

William Lam (@lamw) has continued his work on the Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blogpost series with a seventh part about the integration with the container registry Harbor (after Overview, PKS Client, NSX-T, Ops Manager and BOSH, PKS Control Plane, Kubernetes Go!)

Pivotal Container Service (PKS) 1.0.2 has been released last week. It includes a minor update to K8s 1.9.5 and several enhancements, find out more in the Download and Release Notes 

Speaking of PKS: there will be a PKS roadshow across the US and then coming to cities across Europe very soon. Make sure to sign-up here if you are interested in learning more. I’ll publish additional dates as soon as they are releases. 

At the same time, NSX-T and the NSX Container Plugin (NCP) have been released in version 2.1.2. NSX-T now supports Kubernetes 1.10.

Speaking of NSX-T: the team just released a Terraform provider for NSX-T and demonstrates its capabilities in a 20min video focused on Infrastructure as Code with NSX-T. 

vRealize Automation 7.4 has been released! There are many great updates listed on the Overview Blogpost but you can also find out more in the Download and Release Notes

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) has been embedded in VMware’s core virtualization product for over a decade and VMware customer are leveraging its algorithms to let the infrastructure load-balance itself in a “driverless” fashion. A newly released whitepaper gives some insights into what’s new and what’s current with vSphere 6.5’s implementation of DRS and explains many of the concepts and metrics in more detail. 

I somehow missed the release of a great whitepaper titled “Performance of Enterprise Web Applications in Docker Containers on VMware vSphere 6.5“.

Dispatch Framework 0.1.11 has been released as well – “Lots of new stuff including open service broker support for services and language packs to easily expand supported language runtimes.”

An interesting perspective and findings from reality are included in the blogpost called “Another reason why your Docker containers may be slow”. Quoting the article: “It re-iterates on the fact that containerization != virtualization and demonstrates how containerized processes can compete for resources even if all cgroup limits are set to reasonable values, and there’s plenty of computing power available on the host machine.”

• Part One (Overview)
• Part Two (PKS Client)
• Part Three (NSX-T) 
• Part Four (Ops Manager and BOSH)
• Part Five (PKS Control Plane)
• Part Six (Kubernetes Go!)

William also summarizes his work in a tweet:

Happy Monday everyone!

Pivotal Container Service

• There will be a “Kubernetes in the Enterprise” session in Pivotal’s London office on March 28. Learn more about Pivotal Container Service and Developer-Ready Infrastructure!
• Getting Started with Kubernetes-as-a-Service – a new blogpost that includes several overview videos like:
  • PKS Overview
  • Persistent Volumes in PKS
  • Container Registry (Harbor)
  • Container Networking with NSX-T
• Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) awards VMware PKS EMA Top 3 Container Management Products of 2018
  • “PKS was selected for its deep integration with the existing VMware SDDC environment including not only vSphere, but also networking, storage and management tools, which makes PKS one of the most comprehensive solutions for managing containers today. According to our survey, integration with existing infrastructure is the number one priority of enterprises looking for a container management platform,” says Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, EMA.
  • To read the full report, download the EMA report Ten Priorities for Container Management and DevOps in Production and at Scale in 2018

• Another great article from my friend and colleague Tom Schwaller on how to run Selenium Grid on vSphere with vSphere Integrated Containers

Platform Reliability Engineering & Operations

• Performance and Capacity Management of Virtual Container Hosts in vSphere Integrated Containers can be easily achieved with vRealize Operations. A handy guide gives an overview about how to leverage Supermetrics for resource pools that can be applied for VCHs as well. 
• I am a big fan of vRealize Operations for Infrastructure Operations and Wavefront for Application-level operations. Platform Realiability Engineers will be involved in Infrastructure-, Platform- and Application-level discussions – what could be better than bringing vRealize Operations and Wavefront even closer together? 
• Speaking of Operations: A test of your IaaS Operations maturity

Function-as-a-Service

• Dispatch Functions Framework (a batteries-included open-source enterprise functions framework) has now a new website at dispatchframework.io, and a Twitter handle! 
• My colleague in the Open Source team Alex Ellis wrote an interesting blogpost on Your first serverless Python function with OpenFaaS back in August.  

• Kubernetes graduation: Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Kubernetes as First Graduated Project (blogpost here)
• The well-known Cloud Native Computing Foundation Landscape has been released as an interactive version last week. The static view of the landscape can be found here. 
• Learn more about the historical background of some very commonly used terms such as Bugs, Loops, Patches and more in this interesting article
• VMware might just have cracked the container market with NSX – great comments from “The Register”.
• Hear VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger discuss PKS during his CNBC interview
• More coverage around PKS comes from the Container Journal: VMware Delivers on Kubernetes Promise

Wow – I had no idea this newsletter idea would become so popular so soon. Thanks everyone for signing up! I want to keep this as interesting as possible. Feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends and colleagues. And please send feedback or ideas anytime – I am always open for suggestions (e.g. via Twitter @bbrundert).

Pivotal Container Service
In case you missed it last week: Pivotal Container Service is now generally available. Check out these blogposts that capture some of the highlights:

• https://content.pivotal.io/blog/secure-multitenant-kubernetes-in-minutes-pivotal-container-service-goes-ga
• https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/2018/02/12/pivotal-container-service-ga/ 

Here is the download link for Pivotal Container Service (PKS) on Pivotal Network. You need to create an account to get to the download bits. Documentation can be found here. 

VMware Cloud Native Applications and Platform News

• Beyond The Phoenix Project Audio Series & The 5th Anniversary Edition Of The Phoenix Project – great to see new content on the 5th anniversary of the Phoenix Project. Still one of my favorite references when speaking to customers about the DevOps.
• Interesting overview about core concepts of Service Mesh with Kubernetes – great overview without going into the details of Linkerd, Istio or Conduit. 
• Going deep into how the Kubernetes concept of “Deployments” works. 
• #111 Google Cloud Platform with Sam Ramji has some pretty cool insights and I found it pretty inspirational – the interview starts at 3:50 min. Sam talks about “Codecation” (learning to code on vacation), “distribution cognition” and the human aspects of computing but also the future and role of computing in general. He also highlights the need for Edge Computing (see above) by saying that “computing is everywhere” that there are lots of reasons for “why computing belongs everywhere”. 
• Using Go as a scripting language in Linux
• Prometheus vs. Heapster vs. Kubernetes Metrics APIs