Among several announcements made by VMware yesterday was Project Pacific, a tech preview of VMware’s vision on transforming vSphere into a Kubernetes-compatible platform. This news was actually leaked in a session last year at VMworld in Las Vegas, so it’s not really a surprise.

What does this really mean, and what does it mean for Diamanti? Let’s look at the announcement. 

By stating that VMware is “re-architecting our flagship product to include Kubernetes” and that after this, “vSphere is running on Kubernetes”, they are transforming vSphere to include Kubernetes components and expose Kubernetes APIs for management of their Supervisor Cluster, which is a specialized cluster that manages vSphere, not general purpose containers. This is huge news . . . VMware is replacing components of vSphere with code, concepts and APIs borrowed from Kubernetes.

What does this mean to Diamanti and the Kubernetes Community as a whole?

My Take: The power of Open Source and Community is replacing proprietary interfaces. Welcome to the club, VMware! We are interested in seeing where this goes!

We at Diamanti believe Project Pacific is a great validation of the CNCF and open source.  VMware should continue to contribute to make Kubernetes a better product without bias to an end-user’s choice of virtualized or bare-metal machines, and regardless of their choice of Kubernetes distribution.

Diamanti (formerly Datawise Systems) contributed FlexVolume to Kubernetes and collaborated with the working group that developed CSI. We also contributed Scheduler Extender, enabling any other vendor or developer to add their own custom scheduling extensions to Kubernetes. 

The goal of open source is to contribute for the benefit of all, and we welcome vendors who profit from Kubernetes to also contribute back in meaningful ways.