Take Five With Tom Fenton
Take Five with Tom Fenton: Takeaways from KubeCon North America 2020
Tom notes new members for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and covers new goodies from Kioxia, Diamanti, Kasten and more.
Cloud Native Computing Foundation's flagship Kubernetes (K8s) conference, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (aka "KubeCon"), was held as a virtual event Nov. 18-20, 2020. As a virtual event it had over 22,000 attendees, almost doubled the 12,000 attendees of last year's event. It is amazing how quickly Kubernetes (K8s) has become a mainstream item that all the major players have embraced.
Below are five announcements that I found especially interesting at KubeCon 2020.
TAKE 1
New Members added to Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). At the event, the CNCF announced that it added 46 new members: 39 silver and seven end user members. The new members included the prestigious CERN scientific research center. This brings the total number of CNCF members to more than 600.
TAKE 2
Kioxia. Last year at KubeCon, Kioxia (the company formerly known as Toshiba Memory) announced the first Container Storage Interface (CSI) for K8s for NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). This CSI is for Kioxia's KumoScale storage product. This year they added new features to KumoScale to support K8s, including:
- A new release of the company's CSI Driver
- Data resiliency
- Snapshots
- Thin provisioning and live pod migration for KumoScale
The company also announced that KumoScale Management Cluster can now manage hundreds of storage nodes and the services required for their software operation. Kioxia shows its embracement of K8s by having its management products run in containers in a private Kubernetes micro-cluster.
TAKE 3
Diamanti. I have been keeping an eye on Diamante since I first talked with them at KubeCon many years ago and subsequently worked with them to produce the first performance number for container storage. The company produces a Container Appliance and continues to be a leader in this field. This year at KubeCon it announced that Spektra 3.1 and Ultima data plane services support AWS. This allows them to offer a true hybrid solution. They also took the opportunity at KubeCon to release Diamanti Insights and Diamanti Central. The first is a phone home support offering and the latter is a portal for tools, documentation and curated applications.
TAKE 4
Kasten. Shortly before KubeCon, Veeam announced Kasten K10 3.0, its Kubernetes data management platform. This release has support for multi-clusters and multi-tenant environments. This release builds on Kasten's last release and supports API integration, multiple authentication integration, role-based access control (RBAC) and policy-based management and backups.
TAKE 5
Pure Storage acquires Portworx. Although Pure Storage acquired Portworx the day after KubeCon, it was such a major deal that I am including it here. The gist of it is that Pure Storage, a leader in all flash storage, acquired Portworx, a leader in container storage, for $370 million. It will be interesting to watch Pure Storage to see if it can capitalize on the presence that Portworx has in the K8s community and become a major player in the increasingly crowded container storage field.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.