This week VMware announced the general availability of VMware Enterprise Pivotal Container Service (PKS) 1.6. The latest release is all and easing and enhancing management for running production Kubernetes workloads. Enhanced features including the general availability of Enterprise PKS Management Console and integration with VMware Tanzu Mission Control.
This week VMware announced the general availability of VMware Enterprise Pivotal Container Service (PKS) 1.6. The latest release is all and easing and enhancing management for running production Kubernetes workloads. Enhanced features including the general availability of Enterprise PKS Management Console and integration with VMware Tanzu Mission Control.
First announced in 2017, PKS is a commercial release of the open source Kubo technology that is aimed at helping Global 2000 companies operationalize Kubernetes. As containers become more accepted as units of deployment, software teams will need a reliable, scalable container orchestration platform like Kubernetes. Enter PKS that intends to help operations teams deliver a hardened, maintainable container platform, while giving developers on-demand access to a production-ready environment featuring high availability, security, and multi-tenancy across private and public clouds.
The first big part of the newest version is the general availability of Enterprise PKS Management Console. The big thrust behind the console is to improve Day 1 and Day 2 experiences for customers. Customer experience is enhanced by simplified deployment while also providing a rich set of features around visibility, user management, and product lifecycle management.
Key features of Enterprise PKS Management Console include:
- Day 1: Installation
- Single OVA download of all required components
- Wizard-driven installation that guides users through easy steps to install VMware Enterprise PKS
- Build-in capabilities such as validations, pre-checks, auto-populated fields to improve the installation experience
- Support for configuring integrations (including VMware vRealize Operations, Wavefront by VMware, Syslog, vRealize Log Insight, and Harbor) with VMware Enterprise PKS
- Day 2: Operations
- Lifecycle management of all VMware Enterprise PKS components (upgrades and patches)
- User management and role-based access control settings from the graphical user interface so you can view, add, and remove users and groups
- A single place for viewing all the Kubernetes components as well as the underlying infrastructure
- Management of configuration changes through the UI as well as the YAML files
PKS now also integrates with VMware Tanzu Mission Control. The Tanzu portfolio was rolled out earlier this year and centers around how enterprises build software on Kubernetes. The new integration gives users more automation and enables all the existing VMware Enterprise PKS clusters and newly created clusters will be automatically added to Tanzu Mission Control so customers will be able to centrally manage and operate all their Kubernetes clusters.
Other benefits of the new release are that it ships Kubernetes 1.15 and the latest version of Harbor taking advantage of all the new benefits rolled out in the latest versions of the technologies. VMware Enterprise PKS 1.6 is touted improving operational flexibility by allowing user to upgrade multiple clusters in a batch operation so the upgrade process is more automated. 1.6 also introduces the cluster quota function allowing users to limit the count of clusters that can be deployed per user to avoid hitting infrastructure limits.
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