Google, Oracle and others announce new developments at Kubernetes Conference

Our latest roundup of news from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018

We continue our roundup of vendor announcements coinciding with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018, with newsfrom Oracle, Google, DigitalOcean and others.

Oracle has announced further support for a number of open standards covering the serverless cloud model, and a new container engine for Kubernetes.

The move, Oracle says, is designed to make it easier to manage infrastructure-related issues in large organisations, specifically security, storage and networking.

"To address these top challenges facing Kubernetes users today, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes has integrated tightly with the best-in-class governance, security, networking, and scale of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)," the company says.

Meanwhile, Oracle's serverless cloud, the Fn Project, is working on new open standards created in partnership with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), including support for the CloudEvents initiative, which aims to standardise ways of describing event data. Oracle is also working with the Serverless Framework to further its mission of multi-cloud and on-premise serverless computing, and Oracle Fn is now using OpenCensus libraries for the automatic collection and display of traces and metrics.

DigitalOcean Kubernetes is another product designed to make it easier to deploy and manage containerised workloads in the cloud. Developer-focused cloud services provider (CSP) DigitalOcean has integrated Kubernetes with its core suite, which includes compute servers, block storage, object storage, firewalls, load balancers and other services.

The product is designed to "allow developers to focus on successfully shipping their applications while not being burdened by the complexity involved with creating and running a highly scalable and secure cluster across multiple apps," according to VP of product Shiven Ramji.

DigitalOcean is now a Gold Member of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Another new Gold Member is machine data analytics firm Sumo Logic. "For us joining CNCF is a continuation of our commitment to being the analytics solution of choice for modern businesses," said CEO Ramin Sayar in a statement.

NEC makes it a hat-trick of new CNCF Gold Members. Deputy general manager of the Japanese IT and network integrator, Yoshinaga Seki, said the importance of cloud-native technologies like containers is rapidly rising," adding that NEC is "thrilled to join CNCF".

The CNFC now claims more than 200 members across its various categories. "As cloud-native computing becomes increasingly ubiquitous, companies across the globe are eager to support a neutral home for open collaboration and the ecosystem's highest velocity projects", said executive director Dan Kohn.

Google has held back a couple of announcements for unveiling at the summit. The first concerns gVisor, a sandboxed runtime environment designed to isolate containerised apps from the underlying kernel. Google is open-sourcing this project in the hope that more developers will broaden its range of use cases and adoption. gVisor integrates with Docker and Kubernetes.

The second press release from Google concerns Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring. As the name suggests this software allows users to monitor their applications running on Kubernetes. It runs out of the box on the Google cloud platform, the company says, and unifies logfiles, metrics and events across Kubernetes containers, pods, clusters and workloads. It also integrates with Apache Prometheus.

California startup YugaByte has announced the first major release of what it calls its "transactional, high-performance database for planet-scale cloud applications". This, the company claims, offers a mix of NoSQL flexibility and scalability with SQL security and consistency: with the general availability of YugaByte DB v1.0 occurring simultaneously with the unveiling of beta PostgreSQL API.

Another company launching its version 1 is Kontena which says its enterprise-focused Pharos distribution lets you "control the raw power of Kubernetes," apparently.

Operations tools provider Cloud 66 has introduced Copper, an open source tool to validate Kubernetes configuration files. With this addition, Cloud 66's press release says the firm "offers a container delivery pipeline to facilitate efficient maintenance of container delivery that is curated by operations according to infrastructure policies and used by developers without affecting release pace."

Meanwhile, Iguazio, the continuous data platform for real-time applications, has released the enterprise version of Nuclio, its open-source serverless framework. The firm claims that Nuclio is the "first fully integrated, cloud-neutral serverless framework for high-volume data processing, real-time analytics and AI". It is integrated with Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Next up is Kublr with its cluster configuration suite, now at version 1.9. "Kublr has already made the creation and operation of secure and scalable Kubernetes easy for the enterprise. But as use cases continue to evolve, we wanted to provide advanced users with the ability to leverage Kublr while fully utilising Kubernetes extensibility and flexibility," said CEO Slava Koltovich.

Dutch MSP Proteon has unveiled a Kubernetes as a Service offering that runs on bare metal servers. "Most IaaS providers run Kubernetes on their virtualisation layer. Proteon thinks that this is both technically inefficient and unnecessarily expensive. Reports indicate that running containers on bare metal yields 25-900 per cent more performance," the company claims.

San Francisco's Buoyant, creator of open source service mesh projects, has announced commercial support for Linkerd, new enterprise production users, and the beta release of Conduit. Linkerd is an official incubation project of the CNCF. Its sister project, Conduit, is "an ultralight, ultrafast service mesh for Kubernetes," Buoyant says.

Finally for today, JFrog, the platform for the management and distribution of software binaries, is now supporting the Go language. Its Artifactory repository now supports the storing and managing of versioned Go packages.