There are two reasons we’ve always been excited about Docker, containers and Kubernetes.

Enabling a True Multi-Cloud Deployment

For the past decade, it has been difficult to make application development (using virtualized infrastructure) truly multi-cloud, since virtual machines and guest OSes are inherently not portable. For example, it’s very easy to create and deploy virtual machines on VMware vSphere or Linux/KVM. But seamlessly moving workloads from one virtualized environment to another while keeping them running? Impossible. Simple one-time import from one platform to another, or from private to public cloud and vice versa is also challenging.

Containers on the other hand, can run on virtual machines just as seamlessly as bare metal. And therefore, containers have the power to offer JVM-like portability in terms of completely abstracting backing infrastructure.

With the popularity of containers, major public cloud providers have each offered their own version of containers-as-a-service (CaaS), allowing their end users to run containerized applications on top of their cloud platform.

What about the portability though? The true portability benefit of containers is thwarted if end users get locked into individual cloud providers’ supported frameworks for container orchestration. You are then limited to using the framework the cloud provider supports.

A true container-as-a-service model is where the fundamental power of multi-cloud is unlocked for deployment of multi-container applications. And for enterprise customers, this also means ability to run containers on-prem, using their private infrastructure, and on bare metal instead of using virtualization.

The power of Kubernetes is in allowing this true abstraction layer across private and public, across bare metal and virtualization, across VMware and KVM.

Making it Easier to Build Great Cloud-Native Applications

Working closely with our enterprise customers, we’ve seen that they are looking to use OpenStack in part as a way to build modern cloud-native applications. Kubernetes makes it even easier (and in some ways, simpler) to build and run modern cloud-native apps, since it offers native support for features like service discovery, load balancing and application lifecycle management.

Announcing Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (Beta)

To address both these possibilities, we announced the beta release of Platform9 Managed Kubernetes, enabling multi-cloud vision by providing a SaaS-managed offering for Kubernetes. The “managed” experience means Platform9 handles all the nitty gritty details of Kubernetes deployment and configuration, then ongoing monitoring, troubleshooting and upgrades, while software developers can focus on using the Kubernetes APIs to build cloud-native applications, and DevOps can focus on realizing a multi-cloud strategy for their organization. What’s more, enterprises also get all the enterprise-readiness features such as integration with their choice of persistent storage and networking technology, RBAC support, SSO integration, multi-tenancy and isolation.

Finally, you get to utilize Platform9’s single pane of glass to manage containers side by side with virtual machines, using a single consistent user interface and APIs. In other words, as shown in the diagram below, you can orchestrate VMs using OpenStack, or containers using Kubernetes, or both!

We’re incredibly excited to be advancing on our vision of delivering great cloud experiences to our enterprise customers. Check it out and try the beta!

How do you use containers today? How are your cloud-native applications deployed across VMs and containers? Drop me a note @Platform9Sys or @madhuramaskasky.