Google, Red Hat Partner to Extend Kubernetes
(hxdyl/Shutterstock)
The ecosystem for the Kubernetes application container orchestrator continues to expand with support for Windows server and greater upstream collaboration between Kubernetes developer Google and Red Hat.
With the latest version of Kubernetes now expected next week, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) said Thursday (Dec. 8) a "dedicated" version of its OpenShift container platform is available on Google's Cloud Platform (NASDAQ: GOOGL). The partners said the OpenShift platform would help speed adoption of application containers running on Kubernetes along with emerging cloud-native applications.
The dedicated version of OpenShift was introduced this time last year as a way of helping customers shift their focus from IT operations management to application development and deployment. The new version based on Red Hat's original OpenShift container platform also allows customers to shift workloads across private and public clouds, now including Google Cloud Platform.
The partners said the dedicated version of OpenShift would be available across all six Google cloud regions. It also will be integrated with several of the cloud provider's services, including Google Big Query, its managed data warehouse.
Google and Red Hat have also collaborated on "upstream" Kubernetes development, including scaling, multi-tenancy and generally boosting the availability of Kubernetes container orchestration. Along with Kubernetes, the enterprise version of OpenShift also supports the Docker container runtime with the goal of building applications and isolating applications containers to improve security.
Red Hat said its OpenShift public cloud platform has so far hosted nearly 3 million applications. The platform serves as "the abstraction layer that works across multiple clouds," Ashesh Badini, Red Hat's general manager for OpenShift, noted in a statement.
Google executives stressed that the partnership with Red Hat also would expand access to Kubernetes for hybrid cloud deployments, expanding capabilities such as the automation of application development and deployment.
In one example, the partners said OpenShift would be combined with Big Query and the Google cloud real-time messaging service called Pub/Sub as a way of analyzing Twitter streams that could be used to incorporate social media insights into enterprise analytics services. The application would enable users to query tweets showing up in a Big Query database, the cloud provider noted in a blog post.
More such applications are expected when Kubernetes adds support for Windows server. Along with support for open source and Window platforms, Kubernetes is being pushed deeper into the enterprise via container startups such as Heptio, which was launched in November by two Google veterans who created the Kubernetes container orchestrator.
Craig McLuckie, Heptio co-founder and chairman of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, stressed that the startup's focus is "making Kubernetes accessible to the enterprise living in a multi-cloud world."
