Earlier today our friends at Pivotal announced that their flagship product, Pivotal Application Service, will be powered by Kubernetes. They planted a flag in the ground by releasing an Alpha version (request access here) and publishing their documentation. Naturally, we’re hugely supportive of this decision.
VMware and Pivotal have a special relationship; it stems from Pivotal’s very origins and continues today through collaboration on VMware PKS. And so, today’s decision is one we have discussed with our colleagues at Pivotal often over the past months and we believe it is exactly right for three reasons:
Good for the community. Pivotal has long been a strong contributor to open source software. Consider Spring, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ, Greenplum … the list goes on. They’ve also been contributing to Kubernetes. With Pivotal focusing even more of its energy and engineering talent on Kubernetes, the project absolutely stands to benefit.
Good for our collaboration. We work closely with Pivotal, and the move to run PAS on Kubernetes brings us into even tighter alignment. Put simply, PAS will run on Kubernetes, and Kubernetes already is best delivered by VMware PKS. So, any enterprise that is starting down the PAS path will be well served by making VMware PKS their first step.
That’s because we view cloud native infrastructure as being composed of three layers:
- RUN a Kubernetes grid. We believe Kubernetes should be as available as electricity, so we make sure customers can deploy upstream Kubernetes across their software-defined data center, public clouds and edge locations. VMware has always excelled at optimizing infrastructure—and Kubernetes is absolutely infrastructure. We continue to invest in VMware PKS as a consistent, complete Kubernetes runtime.
- MANAGE consistent operations. We know that as enterprises add more developers, clusters and clouds, they exponentially increase the complexity of managing their footprint. We see VMware and Pivotal as having key roles in stripping away unnecessary complexity to give customers tight control of policy, security and compliance.
- BUILD modern developer tools and services. This is where Pivotal has always shined. Pivotal Application Service and its component parts help organizations build a modern software supply chain. Those services are now fully connected to the underlying Kubernetes grid.
Working together with Pivotal, we have the most holistic view of cloud native infrastructure.
Good for customers. Of course, this is all good for our joint customers. We believe upstream Kubernetes provides customers the greatest degree of flexibility in how they build out their cloud native infrastructure, and how they build or modernize applications. That’s why Pivotal is introducing alpha versions of Build Service and RabbitMQ on Kubernetes—these and other services will now be delivered first and best on VMware PKS.
The cloud native market is changing rapidly, and so providers that intend to lead need to be equally agile. By moving PAS to Kubernetes, Pivotal has shown it is tuned in to the market and to its customers. Companies that are listening are in the best position to innovate and we’re excited to see how Pivotal will move forward—for the community, our collaboration and our customers.
