Pivotal securely spans major clouds with PKS 1.3 release

Pivotal securely spans major clouds with PKS 1.3 release

Pivotal Container Service 1.3 is now available, fleshing out the list of supported major cloud providers and bringing  enhanced networking features amongst other things.

PKS 1.3 is the first release which not only includes functions to dynamically add worker nodes as needed, but also to safely remove them and reallocate workloads once demands die down. It also finally includes full production support for Microsoft Azure, which means that all major public cloud providers as well as on-premises vSphere are now covered to give users the chance of moving workloads between offerings.

Along with the control plane, PKS is now able to backup and recover Kubernetes clusters deployed in single master mode, by using BOSH’s Backup and Restore tools. BOSH is an infrastructure as a service orchestration platform stemming from the Cloud Foundry project and plays a central role in PKS. Basis of Pivotal’s container service however is Cloud Foundry’s container runtime, which some might now under its old name Kubo.

PKS also makes use of networking capabilities provided by VMware’s NSX-T and updated the network profile feature introduced in v1.2 to configure networking and security parameters. In the new version, the profile includes more networking parameters for Kubernetes clusters and a way to deploy multiple PKS instances on a shared NSX-T instance. For end-to-end isolation, those PKS instances can be deployed in dedicated tier 0 routers, making it easier for users to have separate instances for different environments – development and production for example.

During cluster creation there’s now the possibility to specify whether pods should be routable and which range of blocks needs to be used for their IP addresses. On top of that, PKS can now work with large load balancers that provide a higher number of services, as well as more backend pods and transactions per second per service.

To prevent downtime after an upgrade, there now is a a set of optional Kubernetes cluster tests included, which help to find out about an update’s impact.

With the release of v1.3, the container service has finally been updated to Kubernetes 1.12, which was pushed out in September 2018 (though v1.13, released in early December, is the most current minor version at the moment).

Another updated component is the Harbor registry, which is now included in v1.7.1. The new version should facilitate the management of Helm charts, help viewing an image’s build history through an UI, and make the migration of databases as well as the replication of images easier.