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Expanding Kubernetes in the enterprise: Google Container Engine + Pivotal Container Service

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Cloud users are overwhelmingly opting for a hybrid cloud strategy. According to RightScale’s 2017 State of the Cloud Report, 85% of enterprises now have a multi-cloud architecture strategy. Many of these customers are looking to container technology to help modernize their application development and DevOps functions across their cloud investments.   

Portability and simplification

To help organizations manage their container deployments across private and public clouds, Google is fostering an open path to hybrid cloud. This approach builds on the momentum and popularity of Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration system for cross-cloud portability and ease of management.

One of the companies we've been working closely with to deliver on this vision of an open, hybrid cloud is Pivotal — which we recently named our Global Technology Partner of the Year. Last year, we announced that PCF was available on Google Cloud Platform, enabling enterprise customers to build and deploy apps that can scale, store and analyze data quickly both on-prem and in the cloud. And today we're excited to extend the work we're doing with Pivotal to more businesses looking to move to the cloud.

Continuous innovation and collaboration with cloud industry leaders

Today, we're happy to announce another collaboration with Pivotal, based on the open-source project Kubo, a tool that instantiates, deploys and manages Kubernetes clusters with high availability on public and private clouds. We’re working closely with VMware and Pivotal to support Pivotal Container Service™ (PKS), a new service that enables enterprises and service providers to deliver production-ready Kubernetes on VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). PKS lets enterprises easily use the same container orchestration technology that Google uses for its web-scale services in their on-premise deployments. Specifically, PKS includes:

  • Ops Manager tile & BOSH release within Pivotal Cloud Foundry

  • On-Demand Service Broker, for deploying on-demand Kubo clusters from CF

  • Google GCP Service Broker, for access to Google services to apps running on Kubo

  • VMware NSX

  • Integration to Wavefront and vROps monitoring tooling

VMware-Pivotal

Complete workload portability with Google Container Engine

One of the key features of PKS is release-level synchronization with Google Container Engine (GKE), ensuring that PKS is always on the same Kubernetes release as Container Engine. Release-level synchronization lets developers and operators build their applications for on-premises or public cloud targets without having to worry about platform drift or compatibility.

Access to Google Cloud Platform services

PKS will also come bundled with a new service broker that provides out-of-the-box access to GCP services including:


These services will be available on day one, for all PKS deployments, giving you access to Google’s advanced cloud services for all of your container-based applications.

Getting started

Visit the official PKS site for more details. Pivotal Container Engine is slated for general availability by end of 2017. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements soon or reach out to us for more information.

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