CloudBolt Software Simplifies Kubernetes Deployments

CloudBolt Software today announced it has updated its frameworks for automating the management of IT to make it possible to deploy applications on a multi-node Kubernetes cluster in a matter of minutes.

In addition, the company is making available a blueprint for OpenShift, which is based on Kubernetes, for discovering, creating and deleting projects on pre-defined OpenShift clusters. IT teams can manage OpenShift projects, group objects such as pods and services in addition to policies, constraints and service accounts via a self-service catalog.

Grant Ho, chief marketing officer for CloudBolt Software, said version 9.2 of CloudBolt eliminates what today is an error-prone, cumbersome process for configuring Kubernetes clusters. The goal is to enable IT teams to manage IT infrastructure as code, he says.

IT teams, via a third-party plug-in available on GitHub, can also now call and invoke CloudBolt service actions through Terraform. That approach allows IT teams to automate IT infrastructure using a familiar Terraform framework while employing CloudBolt to, for example, track resource usage.

Kubernetes is one of many cloud platforms, including IBM Cloud and VMware for AWS, that CloudBolt supports. For the most part, Ho said most of the Kubernetes usage is confined to application development and testing environments. However, it’s only a matter of time before IT organizations begin to operationalize Kubernetes at scale in production environments. CloudBolt provides a means of achieving that goal using a framework that also can be employed to manage a wide variety of cloud platforms, rather than having to acquire and master multiple tools for each platform, he said.

Like a lot of providers of tools, CloudBolt is betting that Kubernetes will emerge as the foundation for hybrid cloud computing. Today each cloud is managed in isolation. However, as Kubernetes becomes more widely deployed in on-premises and public cloud computing environments, it becomes possible to take advantage of a standard set of application programming interfaces to unify the management of multiple clouds. However, it may be another year before or more before Kubernetes achieves enough critical mass in terms of the adoption of multiple cloud services and on-premises IT environments.

In the meantime, frameworks such as CloudBolt serve to make Kubernetes more accessible to IT teams, who can either set up a self-service portal for developers or allow developers to programmatically invoke IT infrastructure via the APIs provided by the cloud service provider or defined by the technical committee that oversees the development of Kubernetes.

Regardless of the approach, it’s not likely legacy monolithic applications running on-premises and in public clouds are going away anytime soon. As such, interest in tools that allow IT organizations to manage legacy IT environments alongside emerging cloud-native applications based on containers deployed on Kubernetes is expected to rise.

Of course, the single biggest issue holding back the adoption of Kubernetes at this point is a lack of skills. Rather than having to master every potential Kubernetes setting, most IT generalists are likely to prefer relying on a graphical tool that abstracts away as many of the intricacies of Kubernetes as possible.

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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