DEVOPSdigest

VMware announced built-in support for Kubernetes in VMware Photon Platform to enable IT operations teams to deliver Kubernetes as a Service to development teams.

VMware Photon Platform will also add networking and storage services powered by VMware NSX and VMware Virtual SAN, respectively. With the addition of these new services, Photon Platform offers an end-to-end enterprise cloud-native infrastructure platform for running modern, containerized applications in production with support provided by VMware.

VMware Photon Platform will now deliver access to the services needed to build and run modern applications including Kubernetes as an on-demand service in customers' data centers. The comprehensive Photon Platform automates IT infrastructure provisioning and allows businesses to focus on their development efforts versus building, operating and supporting a custom solution.

"VMware Photon Platform takes a major step forward by empowering IT teams to deliver, secure and operate the modern services that development teams require with the infrastructure automation demanded by today's leading enterprise organizations," said Paul Fazzone, VP and GM, Cloud-Native Applications Business Unit, VMware. "Based on the industry-leading hypervisor, network virtualization and hyper-converged storage solutions, VMware Photon Platform offers customers unprecedented business speed and agility to deliver innovative software solutions to market quicker."

In August 2015, VMware introduced Photon Platform as an enterprise cloud-native infrastructure platform optimized for containers and modern applications. It is purpose-built for use in API-driven, multi-tenant and high-scale environments. With this release, VMware will expand Photon Platform with new developer services and broader infrastructure functionality including:

- VMware Photon Platform will enable IT operations teams to deliver Kubernetes as a Service to developers in a multi-tenant fashion for workload isolation and security. Kubernetes clusters -- which can be sized from single node clusters to hundreds of nodes -- can be provisioned in minutes with developers being able to scale up their clusters as needed with no down time. The resilient VMware Photon Platform features high availability capabilities such as automatic healing from failures to reduce downtime of Kubernetes services. VMware provides end-to-end support of Photon Platform including a commercially-supported distribution of Kubernetes.

- Photon Platform will introduce network services based on the industry leading VMware NSX. Initially, the platform will provide switching and routing services. Over time, the platform will offer a complete set of logical networking elements and services. Learn more about VMware NSX.

- Photon Platform will introduce block storage services featuring the industry-leading VMware Virtual SAN. This new service will offer flexible, programmable and proven persistent storage for containerized and cloud-native applications. The service will deliver elastic storage that scales up and out to enable rapid application deployment. Workloads will benefit from robust data services such as deduplication, stretched clusters, erasure coding and more. Built using a hyper-converged infrastructure model, Photon Platform offers customers a simplified hardware architecture that enables customers to scale-out their server and storage resources incrementally. Photon Platform will also connect to external NAS and SAN arrays. Learn more about VMware Virtual SAN.

Photon Platform has incorporated Kubernetes, network and storage services to enable IT to deliver a growing set of on-demand services to developers. Developers will be able to rapidly provision Kubernetes clusters, containers and virtual machines from a catalog of machine sizes, container and operating system base images managed by IT.

Photon Platform is suited for deployments where organizations are embracing DevOps and agile development practices and require a technology stack that aligns with modern application development practices. Additionally, Photon Platform supports IT operations teams moving workloads from public cloud to private cloud to reduce OPEX costs without sacrificing the benefits of highly available IT resources.

VMware Photon Platform will become available in Q4 2016.