Kubernetes in the enterprise with VMware NSX-T and vRealize Automation
This post is written by Hany Michaels, Senior Staff Architect at VMware – Personal blog: www.hanymichaels.com
We’ve all seen the VMware PKS announcement at VMworld 2017, and we are all excited about it. The idea of provisioning Kubernetes clusters in an easy way, with day-2 operations, inside your datacenters, has been a request from most of the VMware customers who are starting their journeys into the brave new cloud-native world. As we saw also from the announcement, PKS is currently under development by VMware, Google and Pivotal and is targeted for GA Q4 this year.
Until then, what if we have a solution today that you can start piloting right away without waiting? And what if it is based on the VMware solutions that you’ve grown to use and love. Better yet, what if we can add to that mix a solid networking and security capabilities to run your Kubernetes clusters in a self-service and IT governance to maintain your existing operational models?
Figure 1: Solution Overview
I’ve just started a new blog series that I named “Kubernetes in the Enterprise” which answers all those questions in a form of an enterprise-grade solution. This solution is very grounded to the real-world and business challenges, and driven by many discussions that I have been having with my VMware customers across three continents so far. I am very excited to start exploring this series with you which will consist of 5 parts:
Part one: Overview of the solution
Part two: Kubernetes introduction for the VMware users
Part three: The design guide.
Part four: The deployment guide.
Part five: The operations guide.
The first part of this is already published on my personal blog and you can start reading it along with a demo on the solution.
Figure 2: NSX-T’s networking & security from a Kubernetes context
You will notice that the technical solution has a great emphasis on NSX-T’s networking and security with Kubernetes which I can fairly say is the biggest differentiator from any other solution out there. We will explore more of those details in the future blog posts, so stay tuned for the upcoming articles.
About the Author
Kenny Ahnemann has over 20 years of experience with VMware in corporate production environments in the IT industry. He has consulted on projects for global corporations, healthcare facilities, Las Vegas casinos, nuclear power plants, as well as NASA. He has a passion for what he does and believes in helping others on their journey through the always changing IT landscape.