Unsolved
1 Rookie
•
31 Posts
0
61
A big toast, celebrating Kubernetes 10th Birthday
Happy 10th Birthday Kubernetes! Another trip around the sun, with everyone (and we mean everyone) along for the ride. On June 7th, 2014, the first initial release of Kubernetes was committed to Github. Kubernetes was born as an open-source version of Borg and subsequently Omega, ‘container cluster management’ Systems used by Google. The goal of the project was to provide to the rest of us, a way to orchestrate containers and Google achieved this through their system programming language, Go. It is little surprise that with the rapid, agile adoption of software development, digital transformation, and onboarding of microservices and containers that very smart people figured out a way to architect an orchestration tool for the masses; and contributed to open-source repositories available to everyone.
Enter in the need for new upskilled system administrators to support the speed, scale, and agility of containers. With the emergence of containers, the purveyors of infrastructure need to be able to support them. With any new application, there are also steppingstones. For many enterprise vendors like Dell Technologies, this came in the form of supporting the Container Storage Interface (CSI) standard[1] launched in 2018, which provides administrators the driver integration to expose both block and file storage to Kubernetes. Dell was not slacking when it came to assessing CSI and in the same year had technical previews emerging and in 2019 officially posted to GitHub the first Dell storage CSI plugin with XtremeIO[2]. Dell officially announces support in January!
And right on the heels of this release, the data protection engineering team was busy building API integration on top of Velero, an open-source tool that enables application-consistent backups and restores for Kubernetes workloads. This resulted in the initial release of PowerProtect Data Manager which was launched alongside VMware Tanzu[3] release for cluster management. These were exciting times for Kubernetes and for vendors alike racing to be first to market on support, features and integration elements. Competitors such as Pure/Portworx and Veeam/Kasten coming forward with their own backup and recovery solutions.
With the advancement of the CSI-driver, Dell was able to roll out more CSI drivers for persistent storage and in 2021, with CSI-drivers as the foundation, launched Container Storage Modules (CSM). These modules extend enterprise storage functionality to Kubernetes for cloud-native stateful applications and reduces the complexity of storage consumption so developers can automate daily operations. Operations such as snapshot creation, encryption, application mobility, data replication, authorization, observability, and resiliency are available as core needs for storage administrators and DevOps in general.
With CSM, room for more engineering around Kubernetes has been opened! The desire to manage everything in one place has not wavered. The tradition of click and launch everything has not faltered either but we can make it easier for developers to do more with tools at hand vs. maintenance. As of last month (2024), Dell launched APEX Navigator for Kubernetes which uplevels the management of clusters at scale and across multisite endpoints. Also, the integrated solutions that APEX Cloud Platform with Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft Azure separately offer brings the access to storage directly from these partners as an additional layer of simplified Kubernetes management. The addition of new modern data applications is not letting up either. With the explosion of Generative AI workloads in the past year or so, the portability and consistency are critical to which Kubernetes can provide to create ubiquity needed across multicloud and on-premises dependencies. While a lot of product advancement have been made for our customers, the introduction of Kubernetes to Dell’s own Dell Digital (IT) landscape has been cutting-edge as they have been able to accelerate their digital transformation and enable 6,000 developers across the organization to achieve excellence daily. The implementation of Kubernetes clusters for their applications and using PowerProtect Data Manager for backup and recovery are testimonials to the speed in which the onboarding of Kubernetes provides.
Today we celebrate the milestones that have occurred alongside the release trains for Kubernetes. With the CNCF and Linux Foundation communities their dedication, release and leadership teams driving Kubernetes, together we achieve innovative business outcomes like never before in industry, across verticals and to the delight of the end user. With that, raise a glass and say Thank You to our pioneers.
Noteworthy Resources:
Introducing APEX Navigator for Kubernetes: Application Mobility
Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM)
DevOps Dispatch: Data on Kubernetes community with Melissa Logan and Barton George
DevOps Dispatch: Growing the Kubernetes project
DevOps Dispatch: The Linux foundation: from the kernel to Kubernetes
[1] Introduction - Kubernetes CSI Developer Documentation (kubernetes-csi.github.io), Alpha release v.1.9 CSI Spec v0.1.0
[2] Tech Previewing our upcoming XtremIO integration with Kubernetes / CSI Plugin - Itzikr's Blog (volumes.blog)