Bitnami Unifies Lifecycle Management for Kubernetes Tools
Bitnami has created a curated stack of open source software to provide consistent tools that can be deployed across multiple instances of Kubernetes.
Simon Bennett, vice president of products for Bitnami, says the Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR) open source project is intended to make it easier for IT organizations to deploy the most common tools employed to manage a Kubernetes environment. BKPR includes Prometheus for monitoring, Elasticsearch, Fluentd and Kibana for logging, and cert-manager, oauth2-proxy and NGINX for managing access. BKPR also offers automatic publishing of endpoints on DNS and TLS termination, including automatic and managed issuing of X.509 certificates.
Bennett says Bitnami will keep track of all the updates being made to these tools and make them available via a self-service portal once it determines those updates are stable enough to be deployed in a production environment. That portal makes use of Stacksmith, a platform from Bitnami for packaging application code in a way that makes it easier to deploy code in a distributed computing environment. In fact, Bennett says the goal with BKPR is to deliver updates to the tooling environment to Kubernetes in a way that IT organizations will never actually notice. New features simply will become available, says Bennett.
By applying that same concept to Kubernetes environments, it becomes simpler for IT organizations to maintain a common stack of software running on top of both different versions of Kubernetes as well as different distributions, says Bennett.
BKPR extends a Bitnami application automation platform that provides access to more than 130 pre-packaged server applications and development environments. Bitnami has existing partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle that result in more than 1.3 million deployments being made per month using its platform. Bitnami employees are also the authors and maintainers of Kubeless, an open source serverless computing framework for Kubernetes, and Kubeapps, an open source user interface for deploying application on Kubernetes clusters. Bitnami is also a major contributor to Helm, a package manager for Kubernetes being developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Bennett says Bitnami has no intention of getting into the business of curating Kubernetes itself. There are already more than 79 certified distributions of Kubernetes. Rather, Bitnami is focusing on stabilizing the open source tools that IT organizations need to employ to manage Kubernetes. The challenge IT organizations face today is those tools continue to rapidly evolve in release cycles that are independent of Kubernetes. IT organizations need a consistent approach to absorbing those updates across an extended enterprise.
Of course, there will be no shortage of tools for Kubernetes. Some will be based on open source projects while others will be commercial offerings. In many cases, the commercial offerings will have incorporated open source project software as part of an effort to create tools that are more accessible. Whatever the approach, tooling is about to become a major IT concern as the number of Kubernetes clusters in the enterprise start expand.
