VMware this week launched an updated version of its Enterprise PKS platform that includes an upstream version of Kubernetes 1.13 and new features designed to speed production-grade deployments.
PKS is VMware’s Kuberntes-based managed container platform designed for on-premises environments. It was launched as a commercial version of open source Project Kubo.
The updated platform includes a simplified installation path with a single download of necessary components and an administrator user interface. It also includes real-time input validation, and auto-population of data from the VMware vCenter Server and VMware NSX-T.
The Enterprise PKS 1.4 platform will also include integration with the latest NSX-T 2.4 release. This will bring along a UI and APIs to support increased scalability and improve availability. There is also a networking boost from combining NSX-T and VMware’s vRealize Network Insight integration.
The Kubernetes 1.13 integration continues VMware’s precedent of waiting a while before including the latest Kubernetes release into its PKS platform. The Kubernetes community released the 1.14 version late last month. But some distributions wait to include the latest release in case there are any bugs in the initial push.
VMware did announce plans for a beta program of the next Enterprise PKS iteration. That one will include support for the latest Kubernetes 1.14 release and its features, including new support for Windows containers and storage options.
Diamanti Drives Kubernetes On-Prem
Diamanti launched its D20 appliance that is designed to ease Kubernetes deployments in on-premises data centers and across cloud providers. The company claims those deployments can be accomplished in less than 15 minutes and run up to 30-times faster than other hyperconverged platforms.
The initial D20 appliance includes a full container stack compatible with the Kubernetes 1.12 release and Docker 1.13 support. It also ships with a Diamanti console, hardware based on Intel’s Purley platform, and supports performance-tier quality of service quality-of-service (QoS) limits. It also runs Diamanti’s intelligent storage and networking architecture.
The company said it’s targeting enterprises that are looking to move their application workloads to containerized environments but also don’t want to increase their spending on virtual machines (VMs). Those organizations can also gain performance benefits by using their bare metal environments.
“A growing number of forward-looking enterprises are taking a bare-metal approach to containers that eliminates VMs to improve performance and utilization,” said Jay Lyman, principal analyst at 451 Research, in a statement tied to the Diamanti release. “However, supporting Kubernetes and the potential shift away from large-scale VM usage presents infrastructure challenges. Vendors such as Diamanti provide infrastructure that can accommodate orchestrated Kubernetes environments without impairing the flexibility or performance that makes Kubernetes desirable in the first place.”
Diamanti announced the general availability of its initial D10 container appliance back in early 2017. That product included support for Kubernetes as a container orchestrator and Docker for containers.
Docker Digits
Job board Indeed.com found a 49% increase in the number of job postings over the past year that have included “Docker” as a skill requirement. However, the number of job searches on the site that have included Docker has dropped by nearly 44%.
Those numbers came from analyzing postings and searches on the site between March of 2018 and the same month this year.
Both numbers were down from the previous year, when the job board found a 62% increase in job postings that included the word Docker, and a 56% increase in job searches that contained Docker.
However, both results continued a long-term trend on the job board of a significantly larger number of employers were looking for Docker-related skills compared with the number of potential employees using Indeed.com to search for Docker-related jobs.
San Francisco topped the list of cities where people were searching for Docker-related jobs through the first three months of this year. San Francisco was followed by New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and San Jose, California.
As for specific companies looking for employees with Docker-related skills, Accenture topped the Indeed.com list, followed by Capital One, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, and LaunchCode.