Kubernetes continues to infiltrate enterprise cloud operations as organizations look to glean greater efficiencies and consolidate management around the open source project. This was highlighted by a recent Rightscale enterprise survey that found 48 percent of enterprises use Kubernetes to manage their container deployments. That usage was nearly double the 27 percent of enterprises that were using the platform a year ago.
Vendors are also increasing their use of Kubernetes to enhance their service offerings. With the latest iteration of the container orchestration platform set to drop this week, we thought we would catch you up on some of the more notable moves from Pivotal, Gravitational, and Google.
Pivotal Greenplum
Pivotal Software launched general availability of its Greenplum for Kubernetes platform. The service allows users to run the same Greenplum analytics database in Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Google Container Environment (GKE), or wherever else Kubernetes is installed.
The Pivotal platform relies on the Greenplum Operator to allow for the creation, configuration, and management of stateful application instances for Kubernetes. This supports automated deployments of Kubernetes-managed container nodes.
The Greenplum platform is based on PostgreSQL and provides a single, scale-out environment for analytic and operational workloads, like streaming ingestion. Pivotal open sourced its work as the Greenplum Database in 2015.
Pivotal also relies heavily on Kubernetes to power PKS. That service was launched in partnership with VMware as a way to allow customers to deploy and manage Kubernetes on-premises.
Gravitational Gravity
Gravitational updated its Gravity open source Kubernetes packaging platform to allow for the packaging of multiple Kubernetes applications into a single image file. That file can then deploy or replicate entire Kubernetes clusters across multiple environments. The company said this will allow for easier management of those clusters.
The cluster images are built using the Helm packaging platform. Helm is a package manager that was developed to support software built on Kubernetes. It acts as an operating system-level package manager that is tasked with putting things in the correct place for an application running on Kubernetes.
Gravitational said this integration allows developers to continue using a familiar build platform for converting their Kubernetes applications into self-deploying images. The Gravity platform previously limited organizations to packaging one snapshot-based deployment at a time.
Gravity is also part of Gravitational’s Teleport credential management product. The company last year added management support via Kubernetes to Teleport that runs alongside the already supported secure socket shell (SSH).
Google Tekton
Google contributed its Tekton project to the Linux Foundation as the basis for a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform for deployments to Kubernetes, virtual machines (VMs), bare metal, and mobile use cases. Tekton will be housed in the Linux Foundation’s recently established Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF).
Tekton leverages built-in scaling, reliability, and extensibility of Kubernetes to absorb software development and modernize the CD control plane. The Tekton platform provides specifications for pipelines, workflows, source code access, and other primitives.
It was initially developed within the Knative ecosystem before being spun out into its own project. Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform that provides an open source set of components that allow for the building and deployment of container-based serverless applications that can be transported between cloud providers.
Google said that the Tekton project will look to add support for results and event triggering, and that it plans to work with other CI/CD vendors to allow Tekton to work with existing tools like Jenkins X and Knative.
Tekton joins Jenkins, Jenkins X, and Spinnaker as the first tenants within the Linux Foundation’s CDF.