Kubernetes is taking the world by storm, and Enterprise PKS is leading the charge! Enterprise PKS embraces multi-cloud, so it only makes sense that VMware’s Cloud Automation Services would support this platform! Beyond Enterprise PKS, Cloud Assembly also supports on-bonarding any external based Kubernetes instance, allowing you to bring your public and private cloud Kubernetes clusters into the platform.
Kubernetes, PKS, and Cloud Automation Services – Better Together!
This week, The Cloud Assembly team introduced the beta capability of Enterprise PKS and External Kubernetes cluster on-boarding to Cloud Automation Services. Cloud Administrators can now manage the end to end lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters directly from their Cloud Automation Services portal. The best part of all? As this is a Software as a Service offering! The functionality was added to the platform live, without any necessary installations or reboots!
Lets take a tour through this new integration!
Integrating Cloud Automation Services and Enterprise PKS
Adding the Enterprise PKS is as simple as navigating to the Integrations menu and selecting the PKS Endpoint. From here, we provide our necessary connectivity details for our Enterprise PKS environment, with the necessary credentials and we’re off. For on-premises Enterprise PKS environments, connectivity is established using the Cloud Automation Services Cloud Proxy appliance.
Once the PKS Integration is added, we can move through our configuration steps including configuring our Kubernetes Profiles. These profiles expose the necessary plan sizes within a Enterprise PKS environment, so that when you are building your cluster blueprints, you can allow specific plan/size configurations to be leveraged.
These Plan’s can be tagged so that constraints can also be leveraged within your blueprints. These constraints will allow the Cloud Assembly placement engine to decide which Plan within a profile to use. This makes it incredibly easy to pivot between multiple plans to consume these configurations!
Once our profiles are established – we can add these to our Projects. Projects are the mechanism that allows users to consume cloud and integration platforms within Cloud Automation Services.
With these configurations in place, we create our first Enterprise PKS blueprint!
With this blueprint added to Cloud Assembly, we can now version and release it to be consumed in Service Broker as a catalog item. This interaction allows developers and consumers to quickly consume your vSphere based PKS environment, getting the same experience they would expect from Public Cloud providers within your Private Cloud environment!
On-boarding and Adding External Clusters
On-boarding Existing
Creating clusters is awesome, but what about adding existing resources deployed by Enterprise PKS? Cloud Automation Services has you covered here too!
We have the ability to On-Board clusters that have been deployed using PKS previously and bring them under management. Once under management, we can see key details surrounding the cluster, including downloading their Kubeconfig file or connecting directly to the Kubernetes dashboard if it has been exposed!
External Clusters
Many customers have gone down the path of rolling their own Kubernetes clusters, consuming other Kubernetes products like PKS Essentials (from our newly joined Heptio family!), or consuming Public Cloud based Kuberentes clusters like Cloud PKS. All of these cluster types can be bound to Cloud Assembly as well to make consuming them easier!
Day-2 and Moving Forward!
Once requested and deployed, Cloud Automation Services provides visibility into all Kubernetes clusters added to the platform.
Kubernetes clusters can be added to VMware Code Stream to work with pipeline services. Code Stream has powerful integrations for creating varying pipeline deployment types with Kubernetes clusters. It also provides a rich set of data back to users via intuitive dashboards. More on how Code Stream and the rest of Cloud Automation Services makes consuming Kubernetes easier will come in a future post!
Wrapping Up – Call to Action
Cloud Automation Services introduction of Kubernetes support demonstrates that we are moving beyond just Virtual Machines and looking at how to introduce users to cloud native platforms where application delivery is on the forefront. Visit https://cloud.vmware.com to get started on a trial of Cloud Automation Services today and see how you can get started consuming Kubernetes with Cloud Assembly!
