“My Five Principles of Cloud Freedom” in the Context of Kubernetes and Containers

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Enterprise IT is in many ways struggling to cope with the onslaught and the cost of public cloud. This is for various reasons such as legacy applications that remain tied to VMs and designed for the pre-Digital world. Added to that silos that span every tier of enterprise IT  follow processes that are not the most efficient. Thus, it is no surprise that enterprises are looking at containers and Kubernetes to be the lever to create apps that create a superior employee and customer experience.

Running container clusters at scale is no easy feat as most enterprises are discovering. Not only is Kubernetes extremely complex from a setup and monitoring standpoint but it has many moving parts – all of which need to be tuned and hosted separately based on the complexity of the business challenge.

The Five Axioms of Software Defined Infrastructure

At Platform 9, our Kubernetes platform is based on pure, trunk open source k8s. We add significant differentiation based on a managed control plane.

The core idea of the managed control plane is a layered architecture that can support the lifecycle management of a diverse collection of open source cloud service implementations across many geographical regions. These resources primarily include VM workloads (VMWare and KVM/OpenStack), container-based microservices orchestrated by Kubernetes, and resources under them (such as SDN and Storage subsystems). 

Kubernetes Freedom in the Cloud

So what is cloud freedom and what are its fundamental tenets as applied to containers and k8s?

I believe that in order to successfully transform an old school cloud delivery model, a different approach needs to be taken whereby these 5 core themes are taken into account with your container implementation:

1. ANY (IaaS) INFRASTRUCTURE – Freedom to leverage any infrastructure type to deploy Kubernetes onto -across Data Centers, clouds: enterprise campus/branch. Across infra platforms: bare metal, Linux, VMware, KVM, OpenStack, AWS, Azure, GCP
2. ANY RUNTIME – Freedom to deploy applications in any runtime (bare metal, virtual machines, containerized and even serverless);
3. ANY DISTRIBUTED LOCATION – Freedom to deploy containers/VMs  to any distributed location – edge clouds, CDN, retail stores etc;
4. FULLY AUTOMATED OPERATIONS – Freedom from operational complexity by introducing a 0-touch automation engine  throughout the life cycle;
5. NO LOCKIN – 100% PURE OPEN SOURCE – Freedom from vendor and cloud lock-in by leveraging pure open-source platforms – not a fork of open source or a wrapper or an enhancement or a vendor backed community.

Conclusion…

In this post, we propose to look at the concept of cloud freedom. It is a given that organizations moving from monolithic applications will need to invest in Kubernetes. They still take nimble, small steps to realize the ultimate vision of business agility and technology autonomy. However, I recommend that enterprise IT leaders consider Cloud Freedom as proposed above that lead to best in class outcomes.