It is Diamanti’s first year as an exhibitor at VMworld. Boy did we choose the right year!
By the numbers: there are 145 unique Kubernetes sessions scheduled at VMworld 2019.
Amongst a plethora of announcements on the first day, the air was unmistakably filled with Kubernetes. VMware’s embrace of Kubernetes and support for cloud native applications is a spot ON indication of where the market is moving. In fact, this move by VMware has been overwhelmingly welcomed by the Kubernetes community. We at Diamanti feel the same way!
Among several announcements made by VMware this week was Project Pacific, a tech preview of VMware’s vision on transforming vSphere into a native Kubernetes platform.
According to the Project Pacific blog, there are now three ways to deploy Kubernetes pods in VMware environments (note that this is still a tech preview feature):
- ESXi Native Pods
- Virtual Machines
- Guest Clusters
Basically, what it means is that NOT all cloud native workloads fit into VMs and hence, three choices.
We at Diamanti could not agree more! In fact, from Day 1 we have been building on our mission to provide a Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) based bare metal Kubernetes platform for running cloud native applications.
Additionally, as a startup, since we do not carry the burden of maintaining support for legacy applications (running on VMs); we feel the best way to run containers is on bare metal. That said, we make it easy for our customers to preserve legacy applications and tooling where they want to via our KVM support. But the fact is that most of our customers choose to run bare metal containers, and they either refactor legacy applications to support containers, or they adopt cloud-native applications.
The early incarnations of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) succeeded in unifying compute and storage however, due to the inherent problems of using a hypervisor, they failed to tackle critical problems such as noisy neighbors, and non-deterministic SLAs for storage and network performance. In the public cloud domain, AWS and Microsoft Azure solved some of these problems to a certain extent by employing hardware offloads.
Diamanti offers HCI for Kubernetes on bare metal with its smart storage controller and smart network interface card (NIC). This enables customers to securely run containers on bare metal with up to 95% host utilization, eliminating noisy neighbor problems, with guaranteed SLAs for storage and networking, and lowest TCO.
At Diamanti, we recognize that there is no such thing as a “green field” environment. In that vein, Diamanti provides support for deploying VMs (KVM to be exact), via Kubernetes. We call this “container native virtualization” and the purpose is NOT to carry the legacy (we have none) forward; but to allow “not yet containerized” workloads to run side by side on the same Kubernetes platform.
