“All-things Cloud-Native” Newsletter

Last week I started a small experiment that I have been thinking about for some time now: a newsletter about all-things “Cloud-Native”. I have been using Twitter and RSS/feedly for quite some time now to keep up with my favorite areas of technology. But it’s tough – there is just too much going on. Some people asked me how I keep up with all these fast-moving topics and news and also stay engaged e.g. on Twitter. In essence, I made this part of my daily routine and I keep improving that practice each day. I also found inspiration on some other newsletters that I started to find useful for myself (e.g. cron.weekly or devops weekly) – in a world of literally 1000s new updates per day, a solid newsletter can be quite valuable.

Over the past years I already captured content from various channels that I found useful and shared that in a structured manner with my customers. But I feel there might be value in this – now laser focused on Cloud-Native – even for people outside of my direct network. So I decided to formalize it even further and offer my very personal summary of highlights from the week in a newsletter. From a tool perspective I picked tinyletter because it feels like there isn’t much overhead for the sender, it has a clean interface and a pretty straight-forward archive option.  



CNA weekly #002

After some issues with sending out #001 of this newsletter, I’ll try again with some different settings on tinyletter. Sorry for yet another email tonight – I promise it’ll be the last one for today!

News:

CNA weekly #001

Welcome to this little Cloud Native newsletter! 

The world of Cloud Native Applications and Platforms is moving very fast – the goal of this newsletter is to capture some highlights from the previous week: blogposts, videos, tweets or other valuable links that I came across. Feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends and colleagues. I promise to keep it interesting and I am always open for suggestions (e.g. via Twitter @bbrundert).
 

Pivotal Container Service

vSphere Integrated Containers

VMware Cloud Native Applications and Platform News

Kubernetes / Container Ecosystem

Running Kubernetes on VMware – a brief overview about the options

After I shared a brief overview about running Containers on vSphere, I’d like to go a little further this time and share the VMware intergration points with Kubernetes. As you are probably aware of, VMware has just released it’s own Kubernetes distribution called “Pivotal Container Service” which became generally available on Februrary 12, 2018. While this is VMware’s and Pivotal’s recommended and preferred way to run Kubernetes in an Enterprise environment, there are several options to either consume any other Kubernetes distribution or build Kubernetes solely from opensource. No matter what path you choose, VMware has a variety of solutions to offer.

 

Compute / Cloud Provider

Network & Security

Storage

Monitoring

Container Management

  • Project Harbor: An Enterprise-class Container Registry Server based on Docker Distribution, embedded in Pivotal Container Service and vSphere Integrated Containers
  • vRealize Automation: governance and self-service to request K8s clusters, nodes and e.g. namespaces; custom integration/blueprints required

3rd Party Documentation

Running containers on vSphere – a brief overview about the options

Inspired by a tweet by Kendrick Coleman I decided to quickly summarize the current VMware and Pivotal provided options to running containers on vSphere.

  • vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC): running containers as VMs on vSphere
    • Virtual Container Host (VCH): nearly complete Docker API support, one container per Container Host VM (“Container VM”)
    • Docker Container Hosts (DCH): native Docker API support, multiple containers per Container Host VM
  • Pivotal Container Service (PKS): enterprise grade K8s distribution
  • Pivotal Application Service (PAS); formerly known as Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF): integrated Platform-as-a-Service offering based on Cloud Foundry
  • VMware Integrated OpenStack with Kubernetes (VIOK): running K8s on top of OpenStack
  • Photon OS: open source minimal Linux container host optimized for cloud-native applications for vSphere
  • Container Service Extension for vCloud Director: a vCloud Director add-on that manages the life cycle of Kubernetes clusters for tenants.

 

In addition to these integrated solutions, you can also build or bring your own solution and leverage projects such as:

  • Project Hatchway: persistent storage for Cloud Native Applications
  • NSX: software-defined networking and security for containers
  • Project Harbor: Enterprise-class Container Registry Server based on Docker Distribution
  • Project Admiral: Highly Scalable Container Management Platform
  • Weathervane: application-level performance benchmark designed to allow the investigation of performance tradeoffs in modern virtualized and cloud infrastructures