Pivotal Container Service® (PKS) 1.3 is now GA, delivering Kubernetes 1.12, Azure support, and a full deck of enterprise capabilities across networking, availability, and operations. This latest release comes immediately after a sold-out KubeCon 2018. At the conference, Pivotal customers such as T-Mobile and partners talked about their success running and integrating with PKS.
Also, if you missed the noise around the first serious vulnerability reported in Kubernetes (CVE-2018-1002105) you should read our blog post on how PKS customers were able to fix it before the world-at-large even heard about it.
Download PKS 1.3 and read the documentation.
Run Kubernetes on Any Infrastructure
PKS 1.3 delivers full production support for enterprise Kubernetes running on Microsoft Azure. Now PKS delivers a pure Kubernetes dial-tone and the same BOSH-based operations experience on all major public cloud providers and vSphere on-premises.
With PKS, developers and their workloads can easily move between IaaS providers. Meanwhile platform operations teams enjoy an identical operational experience for Kubernetes, regardless of IaaS target. Pivotal customers require this multi-cloud flexibility and we’re excited to make it fully available for Kubernetes in this release.
“When West makes a decision around its utilization of public cloud assets, the diversity of our business drives this…we have workloads running directly on each of the IaaS (Azure, AWS and GCP). In some cases our customers also have an opinion about where our infrastructure runs. ”
This release is a result of a close collaboration between Pivotal and Microsoft Azure engineering teams, ensuring a smooth deployment and operational experience. In the following video, Pivotal's Dan Baskette demonstrates the use of PKS on Microsoft Azure to configure an 8-node cluster on which he then deploys the Pivotal Greenplum Data Platform. He also shows the power of cluster scale-up and -down, a new capability in PKS 1.3.
“Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides a low friction approach to deploying and managing large scale applications across Azure and on-premise. This aligns well with the Azure hybrid strategy. Our engineering and business partnership with Pivotal enabled this great integrated experience for our shared customers. We are excited to see this experience now extending to a new platform."
PKS Includes Kubernetes 1.12
As usual, a new version of PKS ships with an updated version of Kubernetes. For PKS 1.3 that means Kubernetes 1.12, and all the new capabilities therein. Our colleagues at VMware wrote a great summary, calling out their top 10 features of the 38 shipped in this release.
Backup and Recovery of Kubernetes Clusters
Now you can recover your Kubernetes clusters and stateless workloads with BOSH Backup and Restore (BBR). PKS 1.3 now enables backup and recovery of Kubernetes clusters when they are deployed in a single master mode. Previously, PKS supported the backup and recovery of the control plane only.
Cluster Scale-Down to Optimize Resources
One of the core benefits of the cloud model is elasticity, enabling IT to move from a model of capacity prediction to dynamic capacity management. Resources are allocated to workloads as needed and released after use, making them available for use elsewhere. PKS already supported dynamic scale-out of clusters, adding more worker nodes as needed. Now, PKS 1.3 also supports scale-back of clusters, safely removing worker nodes while reallocating workloads to the remaining nodes. You can see this in action in the video above.
More Flexibility for Network and Security Configuration
PKS continues to innovate in the Kubernetes networking space, thanks to the included NSX-T networking capabilities from VMware. This includes more options for the network profile feature introduced in PKS 1.2.
Here we've summarized the new capabilities; visit VMware's blog for details.
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Better tenant isolation with multiple tier 0 and selectable tier 0 routers (video)
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Improved traceability and visibility with routable CIDRs for pods
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Better networking optimization with selective IP address range and subnet size for pod IP addresses
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Increased scalability by supporting larger load balancers
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Better isolation across environments by deploying multiple VMware PKS control planes with a single NSX-T instance
PKS includes Harbor 1.7.1
PKS 1.3 also includes Harbor 1.7.1 with features such as Helm charts management, improved LDAP support, image replication, and database migrations. Harbor 1.7.1 also brings more advanced features, such as the ability to view image build history with the UI, re-tag images, and perform online garbage collection. Learn more about Harbor 1.7 here.
Get Started Today
For more information, check out the VMware blog for PKS 1.3 here. You can also learn more about Pivotal Container Service 1.3 on our website. Or to get some hands-on experience, take the VMware PKS hands-on labs.
