Arts and Crafts of Designing a Container Platform — Part 1: Sharpen the Pencil
Written by Hasibe Göçülü and Sergio Vicente Ruiz
Leaving aside the titanic enterprise of building up a container platform based only on the vast variety of open source components and tools available today, making the right choice for any company from the increasing vendor-supported options, is not either an easy task for the most expert and skilled team.
- There are over 90 Kubernetes offerings certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, some of which are “managed” Kubernetes services from Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services, and others opinionated Kubernetes distributions supported by Software Vendors, like Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
- In addition, nowadays, the top CSPs have some sort of HW/SW bundle to deliver their certified Kubernetes services in the client selected premises or in others public cloud. This is the case of AWS Outposts, Google Anthos, Azure Stack and IBM Cloud Satellite.
- Very often, a single Kubernetes services, distribution or packaged offering would not satisfy the complete requirements of the company, and a hybrid and/or multi cloud strategy might need to be adopted. Every Kubernetes player has developed its own set of tools and services to help manage the multiple Kubernetes-based environments deployed across public clouds and traditional data centers.
Necessarily, as the limits between Kubernetes services, distributions, bundles and managers are frequently blurring, choosing the right container platform for a given company could be a challenging duty.
In Part 2: Get Out Your Colors of this blog series, we will introduce the main Kubernetes offerings provided by CSPs and Software Vendors, which will setup the base for designing the right solution for the company needs.
Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter for news and updates on this series!
Hasibe Goculu
Sergio Vicente Ruiz
Disclaimer:
Every reasonable effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is reasonably comprehensive, accurate, clear and up to date at the time of writing this document.
However, the information provided on or via this document may not necessarily be completely comprehensive or accurate, and, for this reason, links to the official CSPs and Software Vendors documentation sites have been included.
References Links:
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Engine
AWS Outposts
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services
IBM Cloud Satellite
Google Kubernetes Engine
Anthos GKE on prem
Azure Stack Hub
OpenShift Container Platform
