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Pivotal

Taking Stock of Cloud Application Platforms

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Based on our agenda to focus on Cloud Native Landscape in the first half of 2018, this post will take stock of the major application platforms to set the context for further discussions in the coming weeks and months (see our post on public cloud for the same reason). In this post, we are discussing the major platforms based on the signals we get from the data we collect from enterprise users. We are also following other platforms closely and our future research will include them.

Red Hat OpenShift

Strengths

  • One of the early adopters of both Docker containers and Kubernetes, OpenShift is built entirely on industry standard components for any container platform
  • With the focus on Developers and DevOps workflow, OpenShift abstracts away some of the complexities associated with Kubernetes deployment
  • With Red Hat’s other products in their portfolio, OpenShift can emerge as the RHEL equivalent for Application Infrastructure

Expectations

In 2018, we expect to hear from Red Hat on their “serverless” strategy. With the success of AWS Lambda and other serverless offerings in the market, the enterprises want to have clarity on Red Hat’s strategy on this. With their JBoss portfolio and their investments in Apache OpenWhisk, we expect to see some announcement to fill this gap.

Pivotal CloudFoundry

Strengths

  • Pivotal’s move up the stack with SpringOne platform and announcements about future “serverless” offerings is a smart move and is in tune with their developer focus. The developers are kingmakers and Pivotal is well positioned to empower them with their focus on Spring and “serverless”
  • With their data assets and a strong consulting business, they are well positioned to help enterprises in their modernization journey

Expectations

We expect Pivotal to move out of CloudFoundry underneath their platform and re-platform completely on Kubernetes and Docker based containers (currently Moby Project). If their core focus is on developers, they should use industry standard commoditized components underneath and focus only on developer experience. We are Day 1 advocate of the CloudFoundry project and we had invited CloudFoundry customers to keynote in our Deploycon conferences but the success of Kubernetes since 2014 makes it critical for Pivotal to focus on building the best developer experience entirely on top of Kubernetes and eliminate any technical debt underneath. With their strength on Spring platform, they can emerge as a strong Kubernetes vendor helping enterprise modernization

Mesosphere DC/OS

Strengths

  • Mesosphere has integrated well with Kubernetes and they are well positioned to support both traditional web apps and data intensive workloads. Their strength in supporting big data frameworks makes them a strong player in the application development platform space
  • Apache Mesos is proven to be a mature enterprise platform and DC/OS on top of Mesos for cluster management makes them a credible enterprise platform

Expectations

Even though they have integrations with many modern developer and DevOps tools, we expect Mesosphere to focus on building a seamless developer experience this year. With the operational maturity underneath (Apache Mesos) and Kubernetes for container orchestration, having a solid developer experience will help Mesosphere DC/OS

There are many Kubernetes based container platforms we didn’t consider for this post as they don’t fit into the App Dev Platform definition. We are closely watching Docker Enterprise, Apprenda, SAP Cloud Platform and it will be part of our analysis in the future.

Docker Announces Support For Kubernetes – An Analysis

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Yesterday at Dockercon EU, Docker announced its support for Kubernetes on the Docker Enterprise Edition, Docker Community Edition as well as its desktop apps as well as the Moby project. This is a significant shift for a company that almost broke the open source community around the then Docker project. They wanted to push the hooks for their orchestration and management plane into the containers under the “batteries included but swappable” marketing campaign. Since then, the wind has blown in the direction of Kubernetes at the orchestration level and the conversation has effectively moved from the standardization around containers to standardization on orchestration plane. In this post, we will discuss the implication of this announcement in the market and how it impacts IT decision makers.

Docker’s foray into Kubernetes World

Yesterday Docker pre-announced the availability of Kubernetes on Docker platforms and the Moby project citing the shared roots between Docker community and Kubernetes community. They also announced that they would make vanilla Kubernetes available and stay close to the recent version instead of the Red Hat model of releasing stable releases for OpenShift Container Platform. According to Docker, there will be better collaboration between the Moby project and Kubernetes project. The end users get the option of selecting Kubernetes or Swarm for orchestration.

The State Of Developer Platforms

It is all about application platforms. How do you empower developers in your organization to seamlessly deploy apps ensuring faster time to market? How organizations enable them depends on the abstraction which, in turn, depends on the nature and requirements of the application being deployed. The early days of cloud saw the debates of IaaS+ vs PaaS and we see similar trends in the era of container native workloads. Kubernetes is fast gaining mindshare, driven by the declarative approach it offers in the automation of container native infrastructure. The quest to pick the right abstraction needed for various applications still see the same kind of demarcation we saw in the early days of cloud computing. It is IaaS+ (driven mainly by Kubernetes even though Mesosphere DCOS and Docker Swarm are other competing platforms) vs the platform abstraction at the developer layer enabled by platforms like OpenShift and Pivotal CloudFoundry (picking Pivotal CloudFoundry specifically because I don’t see any other credible vendor in that ecosystem) vs the serverless or Functions as a Service offerings. The usage patterns range from monolithic and web apps in IaaS+ to Modern apps including Microservices on developers focussed platforms like OpenShift and CloudFoundry to event-driven Microservices in the Serverless/FaaS platforms.

The announcement by CloudFoundry that Kubernetes will become the Container Runtime for CloudFoundry platform combined with Docker’s announcement that Kubernetes will be one of the choices in orchestration plane puts Kubernetes as the core component in the container native application platforms. Kubernetes, by itself, has limited impact but it is emerging as the core component of modern day platforms whether it is IaaS+ or modern PaaS or FaaS. Both Pivotal CloudFoundry and Docker are positioning their support for Kubernetes as giving a choice to their customers. While this may be true in the short term, there is a high chance that Kubernetes will emerge as a standard in the container orchestration and be a standard component of any developer-centric platform.

In that sense, Kubernetes is fast emerging as a standard for container orchestration. But, we want to discount any notion that Kubernetes has won the platform wars. The platform market is wide open with many of the workloads still in VM machines and Kubernetes adoption in production is still in early stages. Functions as a Service (as a public cloud service) or a FaaS Platform that is multi-cloud and agnostic of orchestration layer may take the steam out of Kubernetes just like how Kubernetes took the winds off Docker momentum.

Considerations for IT Decision Makers

This makes the decision much easier for IT decision makers and it helps them consolidate their platform choices without worrying about whether the platform supports Kubernetes or not. If your organization has already invested in Docker Platform, this makes it easy to have a mixed environment where Kubernetes can be used for managing dev and test clusters and Docker Swarm for production. The next version of Docker Enterprise Edition and Docker Community Edition will make this easier for your organization. If you are not a Docker shop and want to have a choice in the container orchestration, it makes sense to go with Docker Platform. Otherwise, there are other choices from established vendors like Red Hat OpenShift or Pivotal’s CloudFoundry Platform. Between Red Hat OpenShift and Pivotal CloudFoundry, the decision is mostly cultural. If you are an IT-centric organization, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is well suited for your needs. If you are a developer focussed organization, Red Hat’s OpenShift Online or OpenShift Dedicated or Pivotal’s CloudFoundry are better options. Depending on the tolerance level of the organization for betting on startups, there are other options like Mesosphere DCOS, Rancher Labs, Heptio and many others. But if your end goal is to embrace Functions as a Service, you could still use containers to encapsulate the backend services but we would strongly recommend that you bet on multi-cloud, container orchestration agnostic platforms. It doesn’t make sense to embrace Kubernetes just for using FaaS.

Conclusion

Docker’s move into Kubernetes is the next logical step for them after they failed to capitalize on the momentum behind their container mindshare. This also makes them a much easier acquisition target as every big company has bet their modern stack strategy on Kubernetes. It will be interesting to see where Docker goes from here as Steve Singh takes full control with the newer round of funding expected to happen soon.

Virtual Panel: VMworld 2017 Recap

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Yesterday, we hosted a Virtual Panel on VMworld 2017 talking about the news that came out of VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas last week. The panelists are:

  • John Allwright, Pivotal Inc
  • Rob Bissett, Virtustream
  • Scott Fulton, The New Stack
  • Bryan Friedman, Pivotal Inc
  • Krishnan Subramanian, Rishidot Research (Moderator)

We discussed many topics ranging from the recent cloud announcements by VMware, Multi Cloud Strategy, Pivotal Container Service, Enterprise use of Kubernetes and whether BOSH can emerge as a standard for infrastructure services orchestration. Watch the video below.

 

 

Pivotal Container Service – A Quick Analysis

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Yesterday, at VMworld 2017, Pivotal Inc announced Pivotal Container Service and a partnership with Google for Hybrid Cloud. Pivotal Container Service (PKS) is made available based on Kubo project which integrates Kubernetes with BOSH. The infrastructure orchestration plane for CloudFoundry. Pivotal Container Service if the commercial offering for Kubo and the partnership with Google will allow customers of Pivotal Container Service to use a hybrid environment between VMware infrastructure inside the data center and Google Container Engine (GKE) on the public cloud.

What it means for Pivotal

Pivotal CloudFoundry (PCF) has gained good enterprise traction in the past several years (which is reflected, in some sense, on the revenue claims made by Pivotal for the past few years). However, the momentum around Docker containers since 2014 and the momentum around Kubernetes project in the past two years are adding pressure on Pivotal as they march towards their rumored IPO. Pivotal CloudFoundry platform got their traction in the market due to the developer centric approach they took in building their platform. Even though Kubernetes has its operational roots, some of the developer centric platform offerings in the Kubernetes ecosystem, like Red Hat’s OpenShift and others, is creating competition to PCF in the market. Based on our conversations with enterprise decision makers and our conversations with vendors, it is pretty evident that Pivotal sales teams face questions about Kubernetes as they go into the market. Clearly, Pivotal needs a response to the Kubernetes story.

One way to compete is to highlight the technical strength of CloudFoundry platform against Kubernetes and find a way to sell into enterprise accounts. But the momentum in Kubernetes is too strong for Pivotal to spend their sales cycles fighting Kubernetes. A smarter move is to support Kubernetes and add a layer of abstraction to hide its complexities. This is exactly what Pivotal is trying to achieve with this announcement. The key thing to notice here is BOSH as the glue to Kubernetes world (more about it later).

What it means to VMware

Ever since public clouds pulled the rug from underneath VMware, they are struggling with a credible public cloud story. Finally, they are narrowing down on a hybrid cloud story with a multi-cloud component. Moreover, containers are turning out to be an Achilles heel in VMware’s cloud playbook. The reality facing VMware is to have a credible story involving public cloud and containers. In spite of recent announcements in VMworld, they are far away from having a credible story on this front. With Pivotal’s investment in BOSH and VMware’s efforts to build a credible hybrid story in the multi-cloud world, there is an opportunity in front of them. They have started with a partnership with AWS where VMware’s Cloud Foundation is available for customers to use. Let us cut the slack here and call out the customers who will benefit from this partnership. They are the existing VMware customers wanting to go the AWS route without much of disruption. If VMware has to gain interest in new customers who are doubling down on the cloud, they need to go much beyond v-services on AWS and other public cloud providers. They need to make vSphere the orchestration plane for infrastructure services (be it public or private). Selling multi-cloud infrastructure services is difficult because of the user experience problem with multi-cloud infrastructure. This becomes even more damning when VMware is not one of the public cloud providers in this multi-cloud world. This is where Pivotal’s investment on BOSH comes handy. If Pivotal, through their application platform route, can make BOSH the standard for orchestrating infrastructure services in the multi-cloud world, VMware with their v-services as front end can stay as a credible player attracting newer customers focussed on digital transformation.

What it means to Kubernetes

To be blunt, nothing. Kubernetes community doesn’t care how the software is packaged. Whether it is VMware or Red Hat or AWS or Microsoft or any of the startups in the community, all they care is about having Kubernetes in more places. But I am long arguing that Kubernetes is the Google’s trojan horse in the enterprise to eventually get the enterprise workloads on Google Cloud. This strategy is nothing new to Google. They successfully used Chromecast as the trojan horse to gain market share in the home media room market. It is a similar gameplay with the enterprises. Google doesn’t care who takes Kubernetes into enterprise data centers. All they care is to provide an easy on-ramp to Google Cloud in their competition against AWS and Azure. This partnership with Pivotal provides them another opportunity.

What it means to Enterprise Customers

If you are a satisfied VMware shop, your IT modernization story runs through VMware and you are well-taken care off. If you are a Pivotal customer, you just put a check against Kubernetes in the Modern Enterprise checklist. If you are a customer wondering what is right for you, here are your choices:

  • If you are ok to outsource your infrastructure decisions to Pivotal/VMware, betting on Pivotal is the way to go
  • If you prefer Pivotal’s approach to application platform against, say, OpenShift, this will help you with multi-cloud strategy
  • If you are not sure, we strongly recommend you do the homework on the acquisition costs, lock-in costs, training costs, etc. to make a decision. There are other multi-cloud platforms available in the market

In short, Pivotal’s offering is a credible path to a digital transformation involving a multi-cloud story but it is important for you to decide if you want BOSH to be your multi-cloud orchestration engine.

Virtual Panel on VMworld: We are hosting a Virtual panel to discuss the announcements at VMworld on Tuesday, Sept 5th 2017 at 11 AM PST. You can watch it live here.

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