By: OpenStack Special Interest Group leaders, Ihor Dvoretskyi from Mirantis and Steve Gordon from Red Hat, highlighting the status of collaboration between Kubernetes and OpenStack
OpenStack Summit is happening next week in Boston (May 7-11). It is one of the most important and notable bi-annual events of the cloud computing world, especially from the world of open source cloud computing.
This summit will feature an increased number of high-quality tracks, talks, panels and other community-gathering events, that are dedicated not just to OpenStack, but to other “friendly” technologies from the world of open source. These technologies are used by many in conjunction with OpenStack, and one of the most noteworthy technologies from the list, is Kubernetes.
OpenStack is an open source solution that allows you to build your own cloud leveraging both the OpenStack software itself and the ecosystem around it on controlled hardware – whether in a single location, or on distributed worldwide multi-datacenter infrastructure. At the same time, end-users require to run a mix of applications, not just pure virtual machines – but also bare-metal and containerized workloads and here Kubernetes is increasingly being used to assist with orchestration of these workloads.
Kubernetes brings a different layer of abstraction between infrastructure (OpenStack) and end-user applications. Kubernetes provides the ability to manage containerized applications providing enough contextual awareness to take advantage of the capabilities of the underlying clouds while ensuring the technical independence of the applications themselves from that infrastructure.
In this context OpenStack exposes a rich set of infrastructure level services for distributed applications to consume via Kubernetes, much as the Linux kernel traditionally exposed hardware resources on a single physical host for consumption by userspace process. OpenStack and Kubernetes provide the level of workflow automation and repeatability required to scale these concepts across the context of a distributed cluster. Here OpenStack works as a cloud provider for Kubernetes, and several Kubernetes-related projects (for example – kargo, tectonic, and OpenShift) are solving the question of deployment and lifecycle management of Kubernetes on OpenStack.
Kubernetes increasingly also plays a different role for OpenStack – it can act as an underlay for the containerization and management of the OpenStack services. OpenStack projects including Kolla-Kubernetes and OpenStack-Helm are actively pursuing this approach to evolving the deployment and management of OpenStack itself
At OpenStack Summit Boston besides the general track, where you will find many Kubernetes-related talks, panels and other community-gathering events (schedule) the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and OpenStack Foundation are organizing a community day specifically dedicated to Kubernetes – Kubernetes Day. Refer to the recent article in Superuser, the OpenStack Foundation’s publication highlighting the contributions of superusers, for more information and background on this great event focused on interoperability of not just technologies but communities. Also, this year at the first OpenStack Forum – an enhanced version of what was formerly part of the Developers and Operators Summits which is co-located with the main OpenStack Summit, there will be a Kubernetes Ops on OpenStack session. This session will focus on gathering feedback from users and determining how to apply it to the future development roadmaps of both projects.
In the Kubernetes Community the OpenStack Special Interest Group is the focal point for cross-collaboration between OpenStack and Kubernetes communities to build integrated solutions. We are always looking for new contributors to join us on this journey, if you are interested in joining us jump on the mailing list and say hi!