The next wave of cloud native applications—based on containers and architected as microservices—are being developed and released, and Google wants to help manage and orchestrate them. This week, Google released version 1.0 of Kubernetes, its open source system for managing containerized applications. Google has been running its cloud applications at scale on container technology for years, and Kubernetes codifies their best practices. During pre-release development, Kubernetes has been undergoing tons of change. It is ready for enterprise attention now that the 1.0 milestone has been reached.

Kubernetes is hot because it’s lightweight, portable, extensible, and self healing. It lets developers focus on their applications, and not worry about the underlying infrastructure that delivers them. It handles things like load balancing, service discovery, and container communication.  

Kubernetes can run on any cloud — be it bare metal, Amazon Web Services, VMware, or OpenStack. Which begs the question: What’s the role for OpenStack?

Kubernetes and OpenStack

We will be on stage with Google at OSCON to talk about why Kubernetes and OpenStack make so much sense together. When Google joined the OpenStack Foundation last week, it cited hybrid cloud as one of the key motivators. While Google might like all organizations to run their clouds on the Google Compute Engine (GCE), it knows that the reality is that many companies are keeping their clouds on premises. Kubernetes integration with OpenStack allows you to have a common container scheduler across public and private clouds. In other words, you can build an integrated hybrid solution on multiple clouds, which can include OpenStack, GCE, and others.

The great promise of container technology is portability. Thanks to Kubernetes, you can build your containers on OpenStack, port them over, and run them on GCE. Or AWS. Or Azure. Kubernetes gives application developers an API they can write to that is supported on OpenStack and other clouds. And even better, because of the integration of Kubernetes and Murano, the OpenStack App Catalog, you can deploy applications with a click.

Lithium Technologies is talking about its experience working with OpenStack and Kubernetes at OSCON today. As Lithium re-architects its applications, it’s excited about the flexibility it gets with OpenStack, because it can use the same underlying networking for containers as it uses for OpenStack virtual machines. The same flexibility could apply to storage or other services.

We’re happy to support Kubernetes, as well as different distributions as they are released. Download Mirantis OpenStack 6.1 today and use the Kubernetes Murano package to quickly and easily run Kubernetes on your hardware.