Meet the PKS Family: Kubernetes Done Your Way

February 26, 2019 John Allwright

Today, Pivotal and VMware are excited to announce a new member of the Pivotal Container Service family—Essential PKS.

Essential PKS includes the technology and expertise of Heptio, acquired by VMware in November. Now, VMware and Pivotal offer a trio of products based on open-source Kubernetes: Essential PKS, Enterprise PKS, and Cloud PKS.

All three products are available from Pivotal and VMware. We anticipate that most large organizations will deploy all three offerings over time, as each service is tailored for a range of different scenarios.

 

Whatever your Kubernetes style, PKS meets you where you are

Let’s review the portfolio of Kubernetes offerings in more depth:

Essential PKS

The evolution of Heptio’s HKS offering. This is the ideal choice for those that want to build their own custom architecture based on Kubernetes.

Essential PKS includes upstream Kubernetes binaries, validated designs, reference architectures, and tooling. The product also comes with proactive support and guidance from the Kubernetes experts at VMware.

Choose Essential PKS when you want to build and run your own Kubernetes environment, using upstream Kubernetes in a modular architecture customized to your unique needs on VMs or on bare metal. This option will be attractive to those with significant Kubernetes expertise in-house, and want Kubernetes expertise on-call. Learn more about Essential PKS.

Enterprise PKS

The original PKS, with a new name to highlight its enterprise grade capabilities as a fully integrated, turnkey offering that runs on-premises or in any cloud.

  • Built-in Day 2 Operational Capabilities. Reliably deploy and run containerized workloads across private and public clouds. Enterprise PKS eases the Day 2 operations burden for container orchestration with built-in HA, monitoring, automated health checks, and much more.

  • Multi-tenancy Made Easy. Keep your workloads properly isolated. Secure your containers within a single cluster by using network segmentation. Or easily deploy multiple clusters for higher isolation levels.

  • Automated Patching & Comprehensive Security. With Enterprise PKS, you can deploy, scale, patch, and upgrade all the Kubernetes clusters in your system—without downtime. Rapidly apply security fixes when new vulnerabilities are detected. (We described this capability in detail, under the backdrop of a recent Kubernetes CVE.)

Choose Enterprise PKS when you want the flexibility and control of operating your own Kubernetes service but don’t want the responsibility of architecting, curating parts, assembling and building the solution yourself. Enterprise PKS includes advanced automation, networking, container registry and implements best practice configurations out of the box for a rapid path to productivity. Learn more about Enterprise PKS.

Cloud PKS

A SaaS offering that VMware operates for you in the public cloud. With Cloud PKS, you can get started in minutes, and pay only for what you use. Smart Clusters automate the selection of resources to constantly optimize usage, provide high availability, and reduce cost.

Choose Cloud PKS when you just want your engineers to consume configured Kubernetes clusters with no management or maintenance requirement by you. Get started in minutes, and pay only for what you use. Learn more about Cloud PKS.

Focus on what matters: getting great software experiences in the hands of your customers

PKS takes care of your Kubernetes needs, so you can focus on delivering the software and services that drive your business forward. Pivotal Labs can help with new initiatives, and our App Transformation approach is ideal when you’re tackling existing workloads.

Ready to learn more?

About the Author

John Allwright

John works on the Spring product team at VMware.

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