HPE Extends OneSphere to Kubernetes on VMware

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced today it has extended the reach of its OneSphere platform for managing IT via the cloud to instances of Kubernetes running on VMware.

Harsh Singh, director for product management and cloud engineering for HPE, says VMware has emerged in the short term in on-premises IT environments as the most widely used platform for deployment Kubernetes.

Less clear is the degree to which IT organizations will want to drive Kubernetes deployments to bare-metal servers. Over time there willbe demand for Kubernetes running on bare-metal servers to address the performance requirements of some subset of containerized applications. As such, it’s only a matter of time before IT vendors extend Kubernetes support beyond public clouds and instances of VMware running on-premises and on Amazon Web Services (AWS), he says.

Singh notes HPE also has on its OneSphere radar screen support for serverless computing frameworks that are emerging as logical extensions of container application environments. HPE is tracking adoption of Docker Swarm and Mesosphere as alternatives to Kubernetes, he says, but has made no decision yet about supporting alternative container orchestration platforms.

IT management frameworks are increasingly being driven into the cloud, Singh says, as part of the need to make IT operations teams more agile, especially in organizations that have embraced DevOps processes. In fact, he adds, to facilitate that transition, HPE took advantage of containers and Kubernetes to construct OneSphere using a microservices architecture.

Singh notes that shift to the cloud also makes it easier for IT organizations to track public cloud expenses. Too often IT organizations find themselves with an unexpected large monthly bill from a cloud service provider because there was no mechanism in place to keep track of what workloads were running where for how long.

Kubernetes will enable even more flexibility in terms of where workloads are deployed. In fact, it eventually will become a foundational component of hybrid cloud computing strategies that will witness workloads being moved more frequently between cloud and on-premises IT environments. Today, many organizations make extensive use of multiple clouds, but each IT environment is managed in isolation because there is no common substrate for building and deploying applications.

Of course, HPE one of many providers of IT management frameworks shifting to the cloud. But it’s clear that as IT becomes more distributed, thanks to the rise of containers, IT organizations will be reconsidering not just how IT management processes occur, but also who in the organization has responsibility for what aspect of those functions. HPE is betting that a microservices-based framework for managing those processes in the form of OneSphere will create a competitive edge by enabling IT organizations to reassign roles and functions more flexibly.

Of course, adoption of Kubernetes in production environments is still in its infancy. But as reliance on Kubernetes to run production workloads increases in the months ahead, it’s now only a matter of time before a raft of decisions concerning how best to manage IT going forward will become unavoidable.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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