Mirantis is calling this, “the first open-source Distributed Container Management Environment,” with “distributed” being the key word.
Source: Pixabay
On Thursday, when the Silicon Valley-based open-source cloud computing company Mirantis announced the release of k0rdent, its new platform for wrangling Kubernetes clusters, it avoided using the phrase “single pain of glass” that has fallen out of favor, instead saying that it “provides a single control point for cloud native applications.
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. With k0rdent — the company’s calling it “the first open-source distributed container management environment — DevOps teams can manage all of their Kubernetes clusters from a central dashboard, whether those clusters be located on-premises, in a public cloud, at the edge, or anywhere else.
“Organizations everywhere are experiencing the need to increase developer velocity and reduce time-to-market, while simplifying operations and managing compliance risks — but at the same time have to deal with managing ever-increasing Kubernetes sprawl,” Randy Bias, Mirantis’s vice president of open source strategy and technology said in a statement. “k0rdent is designed for creating customized internal developer platforms, powered by Kubernetes, that assist in large-scale application management across any infrastructure anywhere, while providing choice, accelerating innovation, and enforcing compliance.”
A key feature of k0rdent is that it’s composable, meaning it’s built using modular components that can be combined and reconfigured to meet specific needs. It also comes with standardized deployment templates, which speeds up the process of getting those customized instances up and running.
The single-point-of-glass approach (sorry, I seem to be the only person on the planet who actually likes that now almost forgotten piece of marketing jargon) simplifies running Kubernetes across cloud service providers and on-premises infrastructures using declarative automation, centralized policy enforcement, and production-ready templates optimized for modern workloads.
In addition, it leverages the open source Cluster API, allowing Kubernetes clusters to be created and existing clusters can be deployed anywhere.
It’s also already battle tested for about any platform you want to throw at it. Mirantis said that it’s completed testing the platform on AWS EC2, AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, Azure Compute, Azure Kubernetes Service, vSphere, and OpenStack; and that k0rdent’s design makes it easily extended to support other infrastructure providers as well.
Mirantis, of course, is pretty much open source to the core and is no new-kid-on-the-block. It’s been around since 1999, and is the company behind Mirantis Container Cloud and Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, the latter formerly being known as Docker Enterprise, which it acquired in its acquisition of the Docker Enterprise Technology Platform in 2019.
“From the beginning, open source has been the core of Mirantis’ business and the key to delivering transformative cloud technologies that empower our customers with the flexibility to set their own direction,” Mirantis’s CEO, Alex Freedland, said in a statement. “At a time when software architecture, development tools, and services are becoming increasingly complex, we are sharing the k0rdent open source project to deliver capabilities that accelerates innovation for modern distributed workloads and put that into the hands of the platform engineering community.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
I have mixed feelings about this. My personal experience from about 2019 to 2023 was that the industry was going bonkers trying to use Kubernetes everywhere, and that included a lot of places where it was a poor fit. There are hundreds of companies and applications that benefit from that kind of huge, scalable tool that handles microservices, failover, load-balancing, and so forth. But it has a huge amount of concepts to understand and configuration and security settings. Millions of applications will never need the throughput and load-balancing features it enables.
On the other hand, this sounds like a tool that makes Kubernetes deployments more fungible – meaning that it weakens vendor lock-in at any of the big clouds. I’m all in favor of any tool that does that.
I have mixed feelings about this. My personal experience from about 2019 to 2023 was that the industry was going bonkers trying to use Kubernetes everywhere, and that included a lot of places where it was a poor fit. There are hundreds of companies and applications that benefit from that kind of huge, scalable tool that handles microservices, failover, load-balancing, and so forth. But it has a huge amount of concepts to understand and configuration and security settings. Millions of applications will never need the throughput and load-balancing features it enables.
On the other hand, this sounds like a tool that makes Kubernetes deployments more fungible – meaning that it weakens vendor lock-in at any of the big clouds. I’m all in favor of any tool that does that.