This is a cross-promoted blog post, originally posted on the VMware blog. View the original blog post here.
Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®) announced the availability of the Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification program to ensure consistency, interoperability and portability of Kubernetes distributions. The certification program consists of test suites that must be met in order for distributions to be certified. VMware and Pivotal are pleased to announce that VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS), based on the latest release of Kubernetes 1.8, has been certified.
The goal of the Kubernetes Conformance Certification program is to give users confidence that when they use a Certified Kubernetes™ product, they can rely on a high level of common functionality. Customers using compliant products can benefit from the compliance defined by the Kubernetes community while ensuring workload compatibility across implementations.
The CNCF special interest group, SIG Architecture, works with the SIG Testing and Conformance Working Group to define and update the test suites. As new features are added, the conformance tests are updated to continue ensuring compatibility. Products must be recertified each year with the current or previous version of Kubernetes to remain certified. The Certified Kubernetes mark on a product indicates it is proven conformant with the latest innovations from the Kubernetes community.
The scope of the certification is quite extensive and currently consists of more than 100 tests. It includes testing for RBAC, persistence, scaling, advanced networking services (e.g. load balancing and DNS) and instrumentation, such as logging and monitoring. As new features are added to Kubernetes, the test suites will expand to ensure compliance. As a member of CNCF, VMware believes certification will be key for the ecosystem to grow by providing consistent, high quality user experience.
With VMware Pivotal Container Service, our goal is to provide production-grade Kubernetes, and that includes delivering Kubernetes Certified code to our customers. We built PKS with a full enterprise-grade solution to address Day 1 and Day 2 needs like deployment and operations. Certifying PKS for Kubernetes conformance lets customers run apps with the confidence that their deployment has passed CNCF test suites and is compliant with the community’s specification. As more organizations adopt Kubernetes, a certified Kubernetes product like PKS ensures interoperability and consistency between different environments. With constant compatibility with GKE, PKS will deliver the latest innovations that are also Kubernetes certified.
However, we are taking it one step further. We are integrating Kubernetes conformance with our software development process for PKS so conformance is designed in. By making conformance part of our continuous integration pipeline and our release criteria, we can ensure that every build of PKS conforms with the policies set forth by the Conformance Working Group. In this way, PKS will always be in step with the conformance criteria, and customers can be assured that PKS will be one of the first to become certified with every new release of Kubernetes.
VMware and Pivotal will be at CloudNativeCon + KubeCon in Austin, and with the Linux Foundation we are providing a free enterprise workshop on Kubernetes. We invite you to join us and register for the workshop as part of your KubeCon registration add-on. Our booth will feature demos of PKS and Wavefront as well, so we hope to see you there!
Stay tuned to the Cloud-Native Apps blog for more on VMware Pivotal Container Service, and be sure to follow us on Twitter (@cloudnativeapps).
