At VMworld US a couple of guys in suits and Sam Ramji VMware, Pivotal, and Google introduced Pivotal Container Service. Exciting stuff! But what does it mean?

Applications on modern platforms run in containers. And while containers themselves are increasingly standardized around the Open Container Initiative (OCI), there are huge differences in how platforms build and run these containerized workloads. This is a direct reflection of the intended platform use cases and corresponding design choices.

Cloud Foundry takes an application centric approach: developers push the source code of their app, and the platform will build a container and run it. As a dev you never have to deal with the creation and orchestration of the container - they are platform intrinsincs which can be tweaked by the Operations team. So in CF everything is focussed on developer productivity and DevOps enablement: an ideal platform for reliable and fast modern software development.

Other use cases do exist in which you do want to bring your own container (BYOC) e.g.: containerized legacy apps, applications already containerized by ISVs, stateful apps and databases, or cases in which dev teams already build containers as part of their build process. Although I would recommend those dev teams in the last example to check out Cloud Foundry, they are all valid use cases - use cases best served by a container centric platform.

Kubernetes is such a container centric platform. In fact, it’s the most mature and battletested platform out there, as the open source spin-off of Google’s internal container platform. However, it’s also notoriously hard to deploy and manage right. Google Cloud Platform introduced the managed Google Container Engine (GKE) to solve this problem in the public cloud.

Pivotal Container Service (PKS) is the answer for the private cloud. Pivotal solved the problem of deploying and managing distributed systems some years ago with BOSH - an infrastructure as code tool for deploying (day 1) and managing (day 2) distributed systems. Not coincidentally BOSH is the foundation and secret ingredient of Cloud Foundry.

PKS is Kubernetes on BOSH (Kubo), with tons of extras to make it enterprise friendly:

• deep integration with VMware tooling on vSphere (vRealize Operations, Orchestrator, Automation)
• integration with VMware NSX virtual networking
• access to Google Cloud APIs from everywhere through a GCP Service Broker
• production ready - enterprise scaled
• supported

Be prepared for Q4 availability! In the mean time I can’t wait for beta access to test drive it myself.