Announcing Diamanti Spektra 3.2: Ultima Data plane on GCP, GA Support for CRI-O and Improved Usability

By Diamanti

Our release of Diamanti Spektra 3.0 — a finalist in the CRN annual Tech Innovator Awards and Silver winner in TechTarget’s annual products of the year for 2020 — last year was an important milestone that introduced the next evolution of our hyper-converged platform for Kubernetes and containers extending to multiple clusters across a hybrid cloud. In Diamanti Spektra 3.1, we added support for the AWS cluster. 

Today, we’re excited to announce an enhancement to the Spektra platform, which further simplifies the challenges of enterprises rolling out Kubernetes both on-premises and in multi-cloud environments. Diamanti Spektra 3.2 is power-packed with some great features that include Ultima support on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), GA support for Cri-o as well as other improvements that empower customers with a simpler, more efficient method to deploy Kubernetes in the enterprise and public cloud providers such as Azure, AWS and GCP.

Unleash the Full Value of Kubernetes on GCP with Spektra 3.2 and Ultima

For the Spektra 3.2 release, we add support for GCP that enables users to create GCP clusters, deploy applications, and migrate applications to and from GCP clusters. Users can also enable disaster recovery (DR) between GCP and on-premises clusters to improve fault tolerance and eliminate single points of failure. Support for GCP with Ultima allows Diamanti to provide a cloud-based bare-metal container platform with nearly the same storage benefits in GCP that we can provide on Diamanti on-premises clusters.

Customers can create GCP clusters from Spektra UI, assign them to the projects, and deploy stateful and stateless applications on the GCP clusters. During the GCP cluster creation, customers can choose the region for the GCP cluster and the instance type for both the control plane and worker nodes. Customers who want to take advantage of Diamanti storage capabilities on GCP clusters must select the node pools with the ‘Ultima’ label. 

Once the GCP cluster is created, customers can assign the cluster to the project and deploy both stateful and stateless applications on the GCP cluster.

Figure 1: Select Ultima enabled instances while creating the GCP cluster

 

Starting Spektra 3.2, customers can also enable Disaster Recovery (DR) between GCP and on-premises clusters to improve fault tolerance and eliminate single points of failure. To set up a Disaster Recovery (DR) for any applications, the customer has to select the source cluster, destination cluster, and the replication period. 

Figure 2: Enable Disaster Recovery using Diamanti Spektra

 

Once the initial replication between the source and destination cluster is completed, the customer can failover the application from the source cluster to the destination cluster with a simple click of a button.

Figure 3: Seamlessly failover/failback applications between GCP and on-premises clusters

 

Ultima Data plane support on GCP is particularly significant because it empowers enterprises to get full Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities, achieve higher performance, and lower cost per IOPS. Ultima also lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) by avoiding or minimizing certain cloud provider charges for backup, data protection, disaster recovery, and multi-zone availability capabilities.

Pod Level logs enhancements: In Spektra 3.1 release, we introduced the ability to view application logs from UI. In Spektra 3.2, we enhance our Application log UI so that customers can navigate between different applications quickly and search through application-level logs to quickly diagnose any issues and reduce mean time to resolution.

Figure 4: Check pod level logs

 

Launch terminal from UI: 

While using Spektra, users have the option of using both UI and CLI to carry out day-to-day operations. One of the customers’ common issues has been that customers who prefer to use both CLI and UI have to switch between UI and CLI views continuously. To mitigate this, we are introducing users’ ability to Launch a terminal from Spektra UI for both Diamanti and cloud clusters (AWS, GCP, and Azure). They can also launch the terminal for each application from Spektra UI and don’t have to keep switching between Terminal and UI and easily and efficiently carrying out their day-to-day activities. 

Figure 5: Launch terminal from Spektra for clusters and applications

 

GA support for Cri-o: Spektra 3.2 adds support for Cri-O as an optional container runtime interface. Users now have the option of switching the container runtime engine from docker to Cri-O.  

 

Press Release