Celebrating Kubernetes 1.0 and the future of container management on OpenStack

This week, together with Google and others we celebrated the launch of Kubernetes 1.0 at OSCON in Portland as well as the launch of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation or CNCF (https://cncf.io/), of which Red Hat, Google, and others are founding members. Kubernetes is an open source system for managing containerized applications providing basic mechanisms for deployment, maintenance, and scaling of applications. The project was originally created by Google and is now developed by a vibrant community of contributors including Red Hat.

As a leading contributor to both Kubernetes and OpenStack it was also recently our great pleasure to welcome Google to the OpenStack Foundation. We look forward to continuing to work with Google and others on combining the container orchestration and management capabilities of Kubernetes with the infrastructure management capabilities of OpenStack.

Red Hat has invested heavily in Kubernetes since joining the project shortly after it was launched in June 2014, and are now the largest corporate contributor of code to the project other than Google itself. The recently announced release of Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service offering, OpenShift v3, is built around Kubernetes as the framework for container orchestration and management.

As a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation we have been working on simplifying the task of deploying and managing container hosts - using Project Atomic -  and configuring a Kubernetes cluster on top of OpenStack infrastructure using the Heat orchestration engine.

To that end Red Hat engineering created the heat-kubernetes orchestration templates to help accelerate research and development into providing deeper integration between Kubernetes and the underlying OpenStack infrastructure. The templates continue to evolve to include coverage for other aspects of container workload management such as auto-scaling and were recently demonstrated at Red Hat summit:

The heat-kubernetes templates were also ultimately leveraged in bootstrapping the OpenStack Magnum project which provides an OpenStack API for provisioning container clusters using underlying orchestration technologies including Kubernetes. The aim of this is to make containers first class citizens within OpenStack just like virtual machines and bare-metal before them, with the ability to share tenant infrastructure resources (e.g. networking and storage) with other OpenStack-managed virtual machines, baremetal hosts, and the containers running on them. Providing this level of integration requires providing or expanding OpenStack implementations of existing Kubernetes plug-in points as well as defining new plug-in APIs where necessary while maintaining the technical independence of the solution. All this must be done while allowing application workloads to remain independent of the underlying infrastructure and allowing for true open hybrid cloud operation. Similarly on the OpenStack side additional work is required so that the infrastructure services are able to support the use cases presented by container-based workloads and remove redundancies between the application workloads and the underlying hardware to optimize performance while still providing for secure operation.

Magnum, and the OpenStack Containers Team, provide a focal point to coordinate these research and development efforts across multiple upstream projects as well as other projects within the OpenStack ecosystem itself to achieve the goal of providing a rich container-based experience on OpenStack infrastructure.

As a leading contributor to both OpenStack and Kubernetes we at Red Hat look forward to continuing to work on increased integration with both the OpenStack and Kubernetes communities and our technology partners at Google as these exciting technologies for managing the “data-centers of the future” converge.