News

IBM Unveils New Open Source Tools for Kubernetes

• By John K. Waters
• 11/18/2019

IBM today added two new open-source tools to the Kubernetes ecosystem: Kui, which is designed to address the "chunky experience" developers face working in hybrid multi-cloud deployments; and Iter8, a new Istio ecosystem tool designed to help developers benefit from rich data and telemetry collected by Istio.

The company unveiled the new projects at the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon co-located events sponsored by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, underway this week in San Diego, CA. Jason McGee, IBM Fellow and VP and CTO of the Cloud Platform group, and Priya Nagpurkar, IBM's Director, Hybrid Cloud Platform Research, talked about it in a post on the IBM Developer Blog.

"With over 16,000 production Kubernetes clusters deployed that support billions of transactions per day," they wrote, "IBM has deep experience running Kubernetes production workloads at scale and understands the challenges that companies and their development teams face in the hybrid multi-cloud world."

Kui interacts with multiple tools, which minimizes context switching and gets more done in a single place. Providing a single, modern command-line-interface (CLI) experience with visualizations for Kubernetes-based applications, Kui was made for and by developers "who possess years of experience with terminals and consoles," the company said, "and who have felt similar challenges and an uneasy user experience." IBM claims that Kui can save up to five times of their time by running a single command.

"IBM has already started to introduce Kui into IBM Cloud offerings designed to help simplify the developer experience, McGee and Nagpurkar said in their post."

The recently released IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management includes a new Visual Web Terminal based on Kui to easily run many commands and navigate the results of commands in a more visual way, they said.

Istio is an open, platform-independent service mesh that provides traffic management, policy enforcement, and telemetry collection. It's technology that provides a way for developers to seamlessly connect, manage ,and secure networks of different microservices. Iter8 is an ecosystem tool that uses the Istio APIs to perform comparative analytics.

Istio8 can be used for canary and A/B testing, as well as troubleshooting, the company says, so that developers can detect and eliminate problems with an application early in the building process. Iter8 allows developers to compare versions of their applications to confirm that it's safe to move forward with a new iteration and analyze the behavior over a microservice overtime to identify, and even to predict issues.

IBM also announced advancement to the Tekton and Razee projects to help facilitate continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) of Kubernetes-based applications. Tekton is a Kubernetes-native, open-source framework for creating continuous integration and delivery CI/CD systems. Razee is a new open-source continuous delivery tool that helps manage applications at scale.

"IBM researchers and developers are looking ahead to re-imagine the developer experience for hybrid cloud and modernize tools for Kubernetes-based applications," said a company spokesperson. "IBM is introducing new open-source tools to empower today's developer to be more productive with Kubernetes."