Kubernetes as Foundation for Cloud Native PaaS

With Kubernetes continuing to gain momentum as a critical tool for building and scaling container based applications, we’ve been thrilled to see a growing number of platform as a service (PaaS) offerings adopt it as a foundation. PaaS developers have been drawn to Kubernetes by its rapid rate of maturation, the soundness of its core architectural concepts, and the strength of its contributor community. The Kubernetes ecosystem continues to grow, and these PaaS projects are great additions to it.

“Deis is the leading Docker PaaS with over a million downloads, actively used by companies like Mozilla, The RealReal, ShopKeep and Coinbase. Deis provides software teams with a turn-key platform for running containers in production, featuring the ability to build and store Docker images, production-grade load balancing, a streamlined developer interface and an ops-ready suite of logging and monitoring infrastructure backed by world-class 24x7x365 support. After a community-led evaluation of alternative orchestrators, it was clear that Kubernetes represents a decade of experience running containers at scale inside Google. The Deis project is proud to be rebasing onto Kubernetes and is thrilled to join its vibrant community." - Gabriel Monroy, CTO of Engine Yard, Inc.

OpenShift by Red Hat helps organizations accelerate application delivery by enabling development and IT operations teams to be more agile, responsive and efficient. OpenShift Enterprise 3 is the first fully supported, enterprise-ready, web-scale container application platform that natively integrates the Docker container runtime and packaging format, Kubernetes container orchestration and management engine, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, all fully supported by Red Hat from the operating system to application runtimes.

“Kubernetes provides OpenShift users with a powerful model for application orchestration, leveraging concepts like pods and services, to deploy (micro)services that inherently span multiple containers and application topologies that will require wiring together multiple services. Pods can be optionally mapped to storage, which means you can run both stateful and stateless services in OpenShift. Kubernetes also provides a powerful declarative management model to manage the lifecycle of application containers. Customers can then use Kubernetes’ integrated scheduler to deploy and manage containers across multiple hosts. As a leading contributor to both the Docker and Kubernetes open source projects, Red Hat is not just adopting these technologies but actively building them upstream in the community.”  - Joe Fernandes, Director of Product Management for Red Hat OpenShift.

Huawei, a leading global ICT technology solution provider, will offer container as a service (CaaS) built on Kubernetes in the public cloud for customers with Docker based applications. Huawei CaaS services will manage multiple clusters across data centers, and deploy, monitor and scale containers with high availability and high resource utilization for their customers. For example, one of Huawei’s current software products for their telecom customers utilizes tens of thousands of modules and hundreds of instances in virtual machines. By moving to a container based PaaS platform powered by Kubernetes, Huawei is migrating this product into a micro-service based, cloud native architecture. By decoupling the modules, they’re creating a high performance, scalable solution that runs hundreds, even thousands of containers in the system. Decoupling existing heavy modules could have been a painful exercise. However, using several key concepts introduced by Kubernetes, such as pods, services, labels, and proxies, Huawei has been able to re-architect their software with great ease.

Huawei has made Kubernetes the core runtime engine for container based applications/services, and they’ve been building other PaaS components or capabilities around Kubernetes, such as user access management, composite API, Portal and multiple cluster management. Additionally, as part of the migration to the new platform, they’re enhancing their PaaS solution in the areas of advanced scheduling algorithm, multi tenant support and enhanced container network communication to support customer needs.

“Huawei chose Kubernetes as the foundation for our offering because we like the abstract concepts of services, pod and label for modeling and distributed applications. We developed an application model based on these concepts to model existing complex applications which works well for moving legacy applications into the cloud. In addition, Huawei intends for our PaaS platform to support many scenarios, and Kubernetes’ flexible architecture with its plug-in capability is key to our platform architecture.”- Ying Xiong, Chief Architect of PaaS at Huawei.

Gondoris a PaaS with a focus on application hosting throughout the lifecycle, from development to testing to staging to production. It supports Python, Go, and Node.js applications as well as technologies such as Postgres, Redis and Elasticsearch. The Gondor team recently re-architected Gondor to incorporate Kubernetes, and discussed this in a blog post.

“There are two main reasons for our move to Kubernetes: One, by taking care of the lower layers in a truly scalable fashion, Kubernetes lets us focus on providing a great product at the application layer. Two, the portability of Kubernetes allows us to expand our PaaS offering to on-premises, private cloud and a multitude of alternative infrastructure providers.” - Brian Rosner, Chief Architect at Eldarion (the driving force behind Gondor)

• Martin Buhr, Google Business Product Manager

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