Kubermatic Launches Hub for Kubernetes Operators
Kubermatic, a provider of an open source platform for automating Kubernetes clusters, today unveiled an open source Service Management Hub dubbed KubeCarrier that automates the lifecycle management of services, applications and hardware using Kubernetes Operators.
Company CEO Sebastian Scheele says as vendors and IT teams alike embrace the Operator framework originally developed by CoreOS to automate the management of Kubernetes environments, it’s become apparent there will be a need for a central repository for managing Operators. Kubermatic’s KubeCarrier will make it feasible to manage Operators that can be applied to applications and services spanning potentially thousands of instances of Kubernetes clusters, he says.
In some ways, Kubernetes Operators have already become too much of a good thing. IT vendors tend to be the first to create an Operator for a specific application or platform. However, in some open source communities, there are already competing Kubernetes Operator implementations that have been created by individual IT teams.
At the same time, IT teams and systems integrators are taking advantage of the Operator Framework being developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to build Operators that span multiple applications and platforms. As IT organizations shift to deploying their preferred applications onto Kubernetes clusters, they can create a single Operator for the entire platform stack.
KubeCarrier brings some order to potential Operator chaos by enabling IT teams to dynamically register services, applications and devices independent of cloud, region or data center in addition to assigning access right controls, permissions and policies, says Scheele.
IT teams can even employ KubeCarrier to create their own app store for Kubernetes services, he adds, noting Kubermatic also expects managed service providers (MSPs) to build a practice around KuberCarrier.
Ultimately, when it comes to Kubernetes clusters, Scheele says IT teams need to focus on software that scales versus trying to scale the people that make up the IT team. The day when IT organizations measured the number of virtual or physical machines being managed by IT administrators are being made obsolete by advances in IT automation.
KubeCarrier grew out of a Kubernetes management platform currently employed by Lufthansa, Bosch, Siemens and T-Systems. The goal is to make the management of fleets of Kubernetes clusters available to the average IT administrator, says Scheele.
It’s not clear to what degree Kubernetes clusters will be managed by IT administrators versus site reliability engineers who are part of a DevOps team. However, the more accessible Kubernetes becomes, the faster the platform will gain traction in the enterprise. Now that Kubernetes application programming interfaces (APIs) are stable, the number of graphical tools for managing Kubernetes clusters should increase. That’s crucial because the average IT administrator doesn’t have a lot of programming expertise required to manage Kubernetes clusters using APIs and command-line interfaces.
In the meantime, as demand for IT administrators with Kubernetes experience continues to grow, the technical barrier to learning how to manage cluster running Kubernetes, fortunately, continues to decline.
