Big vendor announcements at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe

KubeCon and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) have been running a joint summit in Copenhagen this week. There has been a whole host of updates and announcements from some of the biggest cloud vendors, from Oracle to Google. That's important as it highlights that Kubernetes has well and truly established itself within the container space. Months after Docker conceded ground to the project in the orchestration world, vendors are looking to adapt to Kubernetes status on today's software landscape.

5 important vendor announcements from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon

Let's take a look at some of the biggest announcements from KubeCon and CNC and what they mean for the industry.

Oracle

Oracle has made a number of announcements in Copenhagen that underline not only the dominance of Kubernetes, but the growth of serverless computing as well. The organization's Fn Project, Oracle's serverless cloud project, are working closely with Cloud Native Computing Foundation to develop open standards. This includes support for the Cloud Events initiative, which aims to standardize how event data is described.

Oracle also revealed it was launching a container engine for Kubernetes. Oracle Container Engine has been developed to help Oracle's customers tackle a range of common infrastructure challenges, such as security and networking.

Both announcements highlight the changing needs of Oracle's customers. It also underscores how open source software is transforming the way established vendors act and view the world. They need to adapt.

Google

Google announced gVisor. gVisor is a runtime environment that allows you to separate containerized applications from the kernel on which they are based.

The company also revealed Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring. This is an interesting tool as it should simplify the way in which you monitor Kubernetes on the Google cloud platform. Essentially, it brings various different components into one place. You'll now be able to see a range of metrics and events across containers and clusters.

Cloud66

Cloud 66 introduced a number of new features designed to enhance Skycap, its flagship container delivery pipeline product. Stencils is, as the name suggests a way of templating Kubernetes configuration files. This will make managing accessibility to those files easier, and means that making changes won't impact releases in the way they might otherwise. Formations, meanwhile, allow you to target container deployments to particular clusters.

Cloud 66 also revealed an open source tool called Copper. Copper validates Kubernetes configuration files; it's essentially a way of allowing you to test and check the permissions and overall configuration of the files.

In the press release, CEO Khash Sajadi said:

"With the advance of micro-services, containers and the surge of APIs, developers and operations teams appreciate a self-service toolchain that operations curate, and developers can run with in production. Cloud 66 is committed to tools that provide a balance between operational governance and development freedom, in the cloud or for on-premises deployments."

Cisco

Cisco used KubeCon to reveal a couple of important Kubernetes-related updates to two of their products. AppDynamics, the application performance analytics tool, and CloudCenter, both now have Kubernetes support. This move will bring Kubernetes into many legacy applications that have previously been locked into the level of functionality offered by Cisco.

Here's what Kip Compton, the VP of Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group had to say:

"The Kubernetes platform has emerged as the de-facto container solution as customers accelerate adoption of containerized application architectures... But organizations are still challenged to efficiently and confidently utilize Kubernetes as they modernize legacy applications and develop new cloud applications. With our latest Kubernetes support, customers can now easily adopt production-grade Kubernetes across multicloud environments.”

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This is interesting - Compton identifies a common challenge around bringing legacy software up to date. With this announcements, Cisco is helping their customers to find a way around legacy issues, reducing the need to undergo a risky mass system migration.

Digital Ocean

Cloud platform Digital Ocean released a Kubernetes product in Copenhagen. Like the Cisco release, at a most basic level, it's going to make it much easier for engineering and operations teams to leverage Kubernetes without the challenges faced with integrating the various platforms.

Learn more about Digital Ocean Kubernetes here.