10 Vendors Jumping on the Kubernetes Bandwagon

Since Google founded the open-source Kubernetes container management and orchestration project in 2014, the project has seen significant growth. In September 2015, the project hit its 1.0 milestone, and Google donated it to the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it has continued to be developed. While Google remains a contributor and user of Kubernetes, one of the big shifts in the last two years has been the growing number of vendors both contributing to and providing commercial support for Kubernetes. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the vendors now providing commercial support and products for Kubernetes.

It is no surprise that as the founder of Kubernetes, Google is also one of the leading commercial vendors providing services. The Google Cloud Platform Container Engine provides users with Kubernetes clusters, managed by Google.

Linux vendor Red Hat has emerged to become one of the leading contributors to the open-source Kubernetes project. Red Hat’s OpenShift platform is now the company’s commercially supported Kubernetes distribution, providing users with a container management platform.

CoreOS is also a leading contributor to the open-source Kubernetes project. CoreOS’ Tectonic Kubernetes distribution provides the necessary services to enable organizations easily deploy and manage containers in production.

Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, launched its commercial support for Kubernetes in September 2016.

While VMware has its own virtualization technologies, it too has seen demand for Kubernetes. To that end, VMware announced support for Kubernetes in October 2016 on top of the VMware Photon platform.

Microsoft now is also a supporter of Kubernetes. The Microsoft Azure Container Service (ACS) first gained support for Kubernetes as a technical preview in November 2016, and the service became generally available in February.

Apprenda has emerged as an important contributor and supporter of the Kubernetes platform. The company helped get Windows support into the Kubernetes 1.5 release in December 2016. It provides enterprise commercial support services for Kubernetes deployments.

Platform9 officially launched its managed Kubernetes services in January 2017 as a way to help organizations easily deploy and run Kubernetes.

Startup Heptio, which was officially announced in November 2016, is an effort led by the two former Google staffers who built the original Google Compute Engine and helped to create Kubernetes.

On March 19, IBM announced beta support for Kubernetes running in the IBM Bluemix Container Service.