Kubernetes – Digital IT News

Running Stateful Applications is Critical to Success Reported ionir

Taylor Graham — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 22:04:31 +0000

A new survey by ionir shows that 60% of respondents are running stateful applications on Kubernetes, and of those who aren’t already, 50% plan to do so in the next 12 months. That’s among the findings of The Future of Stateful Applications on Kubernetes report.

Enterprises have noted there are many advantages to adopting Kubernetes. The primary benefit of running stateful applications on Kubernetes, according to respondents, is that they are critical to business success and their journey toward digital transformation. Sixty-three percent of respondents noted that upon adopting Kubernetes, they also moved to new Kubernetes databases, suggesting that adoption elicits an infrastructure-wide digital transformation.

Kubernetes adoption is key to enabling better management and to leveraging data, stateful applications, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Enterprise DevOps teams will see value running Kubernetes by freeing them from vendor lock-in and enabling data mobility to, from and across multiple cloud vendors.

The survey also finds that organizations are investing in deploying Kubernetes with the goals of:

Increasing agility, portability and flexibility – 61% of respondents ranked data persistence as the number one data services for Kubernetes adoption, and 43% said data mobility was their top data services. The top benefit, according to 60% of respondents, of adopting Kubernetes is an increase in agility, portability and flexibility.
Accelerating DevOps – Businesses agree that running stateful applications on Kubernetes will also continue to be a key motivator for DevOps professionals. Over half (60%) of those already using Kubernetes or planning to within the next 12 months are using Kubernetes for database/transaction processing.
Facilitating multi-cloud – More than 65% of respondents said multi-cloud support is critical or valuable. Increased availability is a top expectation from multi-cloud technologies, according to nearly 62% of respondents. This will allow DevOps teams to be independent from one vendor and allow for the agile movement of data to, from and across multiple cloud vendors.

“Kubernetes enables data mobility – vital for today’s enterprises. Our report reveals just how important container orchestration has become, and its benefits are clear for organizations in general and for DevOps practices in particular. We look forward to translating the information from this report into ongoing improvements to our cloud-native storage and data management platform, so customers have every advantage they need to succeed.” said Mike Wall, CEO, ionir, the cloud-native storage and data management platform for Kubernetes.

The Future of Stateful Applications on Kubernetes report is available on the ionir website here.

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Public Sector Hybrid Work Enablement Simplified by Citrix®

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Cloud-Native Research Reveals Top Concerns of Respondents

Taylor Graham — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 23:31:32 +0000

Platform9 announced the results of its inaugural “2022 Enterprise Trends in Cloud Native” research, revealing that 91% of survey respondents cite security, consistent management across environments, high availability, and observability as their top concerns for operating cloud-native technologies. The research also found that despite fast growing public-cloud deployments, 67% of cloud deployments are distributed, spread out across on-premises, hybrid, and edge clouds. Platform9 is the world’s #1 open distributed cloud service, offering the power of the public cloud on infrastructure of customers’ choice – powered by Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies.

The report, which surveyed over 500 technology executives and practitioners, details how enterprises are adopting cloud-native technologies, provides insight into 2022 technology investment priorities, and identifies top concerns to help business leaders and enterprises determine how best to navigate and accelerate their cloud-native initiatives for the rest of the year.

Specific findings include:

Kubernetes dominates container management: App containerization is accelerating, with 53% of respondents planning to containerize their current applications. Nearly 85% of respondents are using Kubernetes or have plans to deploy it in the next six months.
Cloud-native hiring continues to be a priority: DevOps, cloud platform engineering, cloud-native developers, and security are the top hiring investments for 2022.
Executives across the board are looking for practical solutions to reduce vendor lock-in: While 61% of respondents have high or moderate concern about vendor lock-in, 71% of advanced users with larger deployments are even more concerned than early users. Additionally, managers, executives, and architects show higher level of concerns than engineers (65%). Plans for multiple cloud deployment lead as the number one action to address cloud lock-in, followed by using open-source services (#2) and writing portable apps (#3).
While security and operations concerned 91% of respondents, executives were more concerned about cost optimization, data management, and high availability while practitioner’s challenges were more around day-2 operations such as upgrades, consistent management, observability, and troubleshooting.

“As more and more enterprises are adopting cloud-native technologies, we see a corresponding growth of the deployment of distributed infrastructure across public, hybrid, and edge clouds,” said Bhaskar Gorti, CEO of Platform9. “What many fail to anticipate when implementing a distributed cloud strategy, are the challenges that come with managing it efficiently, and the high skill-level needed to do so. It’s critical that leaders prioritize a cloud-agnostic provider in order to achieve their goals faster and with less complexity, while minimizing the vendor lock-in concerns identified in the research.”

“Platform9’s research concretely reflects concerns we have heard from enterprise and service provider users adopting container and cloud-native platforms,” said Roy Chua, founder and principal at AvidThink. “Now that we are a few years into mainstream use of containers, leading users are reflecting their learnings and concerns across strategic, scaling, and operational elements of container and cloud services. The insights provided in the research make it required reading for enterprise IT leaders regardless of whether they are novices or seasoned experts in cloud transformation.”

“We’ve seen that there is a high-level of concern among enterprises when it comes to consistent management across clusters, uptime and SLA, cost optimization, and troubleshooting, yet there is a major gap in knowing how to actually solve for these challenges,” said Madhura Maskasky, VP of product at Platform9. “Hearing from various industry experts on the emerging cloud-native solutions available to address these issues will enable these companies to gain a comprehensive understanding of operating their deployments effectively, especially at distributed scale.”

Learn about Platform9 or to access the complete “2022 Enterprise Trends in Cloud Native” research, click here.

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More Big Data Applications Move to Kubernetes by January, 2022

Taylor Graham — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 07:21:13 +0000

Pepperdata, the leader in Big Data Application Performance, announced the results of a new survey to gauge the pace at which enterprises are migrating big data applications to Kubernetes containers. 600 senior enterprise IT professionals in industries ranging from finance, healthcare, automotive, telecommunications, retail and other data-intensive businesses were polled. Companies ranged from 500 employees to more than 5,000.

Kubernetes is the preferred container orchestration technology for its agility, speed and efficiency for scaling and managing apps and infrastructure. Because of this, 77 percent of respondents signaled their intent to migrate 50 percent or more of their big data applications to containers with Kubernetes by the end of the year. Applications that topped the list of those moving to Kubernetes include Spark, which was the most popular with 63 percent of the votes. Presto took 2nd with 45 percent, Kafka came in at 42 percent, and Trino scored 34 percent. Flink followed up with 27 percent.

The biggest challenges with containers and Kubernetes reported by those surveyed include:

Allocation and reallocation of resources (30 percent)
A lack of comprehensive visibility and monitoring tools (26 percent)
Fragmentation in the Kubernetes marketplace (so many tools and opinions, 20 percent)
Difficulty manually tuning Kubernetes (nine percent)
Complexity and scaling (15 percent)

“The velocity of the shift to Kubernetes is surprising. It’s gratifying to see big data move to Kubernetes with this speed. It’s clear that this shift will create optimization challenges as customers understand the nuances of running within the Kubernetes environment,” said Ash Munshi, CEO, Pepperdata. “Pepperdata is uniquely positioned to help customers moving to Kubernetes maximize resource utilization while controlling costs.”

When asked what their goals were for migrating to containers, respondents were split. 45 percent want an increase in application performance and stability. 27 percent said flexibility and portability of workloads; and 18 percent want to decrease costs. 10 percent said they wanted a multi-cloud solution to keep from being locked into one cloud vendor.

View the full Pepperdata Kubernetes Survey Report.

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Big Memory Cloud Technology from MemVerge Has Been Unveiled

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Kasten K10 Announces Support for AWS for Containers Anywhere

Taylor Graham — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 23:29:54 +0000

Kasten by Veeam®, the market leader for Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery, announced the availability of the Kasten K10 Kubernetes data management platform in AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere. AWS Marketplace customers can now seamlessly purchase and license Kasten K10. Enterprises will be able to extend the same protection offered by Kasten K10 for Kubernetes applications on AWS to their Kubernetes clusters on-premises to better protect and optimize their Kubernetes investments.

“Veeam, a member of the AWS Partner Network, has expanded its relationship with AWS by launching the Kasten by Veeam well-architected backup and disaster recovery products for AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere,” said Chris Grusz, Director of AWS Marketplace, AWS. “Now, AWS customers can find Kasten by Veeam in AWS Marketplace and deploy on any Kubernetes cluster in any environment, in AWS or on-premises Kubernetes clusters, creating simple and secure protection for growing Kubernetes application deployments regardless of physical location.”

More than 90% of organizations used Kubernetes in 2020 — an increase of 33% over the previous two years, according to a recent report by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).[i] To address the Kubernetes data protection needs of enterprises adopting hybrid cloud strategies, the benefits of Kasten K10’s availability in AWS Marketplace include:

Easy procurement and flexible license management in AWS Marketplace: Flexible procurement options include contract options, where customers subscribe to the application for a term of one month, one year, two years, or three years. With the support of AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere, Kasten K10’s AWS Marketplace listing for hybrid deployments includes support for on-premises clusters with upstream Kubernetes in addition to clusters on AWS.
Simple, reliable, AWS-integrated backup and recovery: Purpose-built for Kubernetes, Kasten K10 can be deployed in minutes within Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) or Amazon EKS Anywhere. The solution’s application-centric approach and deep integrations with the most popular relational and NoSQL databases, and storage systems provide backup/restore of entire Kubernetes applications. In addition, the solution provides support of several AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) for exceptional operational simplicity.
Enhanced ransomware protection with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Object Lock: A common Amazon S3 target can be used as reliable target storage for all on-premises and cloud-native Amazon EKS backups. Using Amazon S3 Object Lock, Kasten K10 delivers a Kubernetes data protection solution against ransomware and insider-threats.
Application mobility and disaster recovery (DR) across Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Anywhere: Moving applications across Amazon EKS clusters on premises, on cloud infrastructure, and across AWS Regions is an extremely powerful capability made easy by Kasten K10. The solution supports a variety of use cases, including test/dev, performance and scalability testing, and even full cluster DR.

“Availability in AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere will bring the benefits of the hardened Kubernetes backup and DR capabilities offered by Kasten K10 by Veeam to a wider range of users,” said Andy Langsam, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Public Cloud Solutions and Kasten by Veeam. “With more than 90% of organizations worldwide planning to rely on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs by 2022, [Source: IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2020 Predictions, Doc # US44640719, Oct 2019] accelerating Kasten’s capabilities will be beneficial to many of our customers and prospects. This further strengthens our commitment to support our customers’ business transformation efforts to future-ready architectures and procurement options.”

“As customers migrate more of their environments to cloud and container environments, they are looking for the ability to easily flex their subscription licenses as their resource requirements change, to improve cost efficiency,” said Krista Macomber, Senior Analyst Data Protection and Multi-cloud Data Management at Evaluator Group. “The new availability of Kasten by Veeam in AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere increases flexibility and convenience for customers when it comes to licensing and procurement for container solutions, wherever they might reside.”

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Portworx PX-Backup Enables Cross-Cloud Data Protection

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Platform9 Announces Managed Kubernetes with SaaS GitOps Engine

Leigh Porter — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 19:03:47 +0000

Platform9 announced a number of new enterprise features that greatly eliminate operational complexities in managing multi-cluster and multicloud Kubernetes deployments. Key advances include the Profile Engine for template-based cross-cluster governance, IDE enhancements for fast access to running workloads, user-specified upgrade strategies, KubeVirt enhancements, and CIS Benchmarking compliance.

“Focused on multicloud governance, security, and ease-of-use features, this product release further simplifies Kubernetes by introducing new developer-focused features that enable instant access to any running Pod, Deployment, or Service,” said Madhura Maskasky, Platform9 co-founder and VP of Product. “The result is tangible and significant productivity gains through the simplicity of consistent single-pane-of-glass management and governance.”

With Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK), users can easily create upstream Kubernetes clusters using the SaaS platform, on bare metal, AWS, and Azure IaaS layer, and with a few clicks, import clusters from EKS, AKS, and GKE.

Featured updates in this release include:

GitOps Profile Engine: Profile Engine enables GitOps style automation in multicloud environments by allowing administrators to define cluster configurations as desired state templates, and then deploy those to any target cluster. The deployment process updates the target cluster’s state to ensure it conforms to the profile. Comparison and drift analytics are built in to detect changes from compliant configurations so users can take appropriate corrective actions. By treating cluster configuration via declarative profiles, which can be treated as versioned source code, it is easier to provision multiple clusters for new applications or teams, to rebuild clusters, or to compare clusters and analyze differences. Furthermore, the Profile Engine ensures consistency, compliance, and standardization to combat sprawl, security holes, and a lack of policy conformance.

Upgrade Strategies: Customers want flexibility in how and when they upgrade their clusters in production. This release provides three options to upgrade:

Sequential: Worker nodes are upgraded in sequence in a rolling fashion
Parallel Percentage: Users can specify a percentage of nodes to be upgraded simultaneously
Batch: Users can manually select nodes

Storage Classes/PV/PVC/CSI Drivers: This release provides comprehensive drill-down views of objects across all cluster types, providing unparalleled visibility into storage details directly in the UI. Adding a new storage class is easy with the auto-detection of CSI drivers for one-click deployment of persistent storage.

KubeVirt Enhancements: Platform9 Managed KubeVirt enables users to run both legacy VM applications and containers on a fully managed unified platform. This new release introduces a management UI and wizard-based configuration and provisioning so that users can easily create VMs, attach disk(s), start/stop VM instances, view instance details, and much more all with a few clicks.

CIS Benchmark: Platform9 is now CIS Benchmark compliant, extending our security posture that includes SoC2 compliance, encrypted networking between Clusters, Pods, and Nodes, encryption at-rest, and ZeroTrust SaaS architecture.

Other significant updates include a 10x improvement in UI performance and responsiveness; drill-down details on storage, pods, deployments, and services views; logs, events across all cluster types; support for Kubernetes 1.21 and containerd.

All of these advances are paired with Platform9’s unique SaaS-based closed-loop automation–including deployment, monitoring, alerting, self-healing, and proactive troubleshooting and support–that guarantees 99.9% multicluster, multicloud SLA. Platform9’s 100% CKA certified solution architects and customer success teams operate as an extension of customers’ SRE and DevOps teams providing in-depth K8s on-demand Kubernetes expertise and proactively resolving issues 24/7/365.

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Veritas InfoScale Revolutionizes Software-Defined Infrastructure

Taylor Graham — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 20:58:06 +0000

Veritas Technologies, the leader in enterprise data protection, announced the next evolution of Veritas InfoScale, the company’s leading software-defined infrastructure availability solution, that will enable customers to deploy InfoScale as containers in native Kubernetes platforms, including Red Hat OpenShift. Native deployment will make it easier to provide InfoScale’s high availability, persistent storage and storage optimization for stateful Kubernetes critical workloads.

“Containerization is revolutionizing the data center, allowing applications to burst and shrink their processing capacity to reduce costs and deliver scalability,” said Karthik Ramamurthy, vice president of product management at Veritas. “However, many organizations are hesitant to bring the benefits of containerization to mission critical applications that have historically relied on persistent storage. The Kubernetes-native deployment of InfoScale will deliver the features organizations need to migrate their most important applications into environments like OpenShift with confidence. This is a game changer for companies that want to take the training wheels off their Kubernetes deployments and realize the benefits where they really matter.”

The evolution will begin with InfoScale 8, which will be available later this year and will enable enterprise customers and DevOps engineers to deploy the following InfoScale features as containers:

Software-defined persistent volume storage classes
Dynamic and static persistent storage provisioning
Non-disruptive scaling of persistent volumes
Non-disruptive migration of persistent volumes
REST APIs for third party integration
Persistent volume snapshots
Container lifecycle management

InfoScale 8 will also be the first time the product is available as a Red Hat certified container application and Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operator available in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog with single-click deployment.

“As containers and cloud-native applications become more crucial to enterprise digital transformation, our customers are seeking expanded choice in the technologies that support these environments and workloads,” said Joe Fernandes, senior vice president, Platforms Business Group at Red Hat. “Veritas InfoScale 8 adds a certified option for customers that want additional layers of resiliency and storage optimization for their OpenShift environments. We’re pleased to collaborate with Veritas as part of our broad partner ecosystem, helping our customers to select the solutions that best meet their unique needs, all certified on the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.”

This announcement builds on other recent InfoScale and Veritas NetBackup updates to support containerization, making Veritas the most comprehensive data protection provider across physical, virtual, cloud and container environments.

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Portworx PX-Backup Enables Cross-Cloud Data Protection

Taylor Graham — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 08:20:25 +0000

Portworx® by Pure Storage®, the most complete Kubernetes Data Services Platform, announced the release of PX-Backup 2.1, its market-leading application and data protection platform for modern applications. Portworx also released new survey data assessing end user perspectives on running stateful applications on Kubernetes.

The latest enhancements to PX-Backup provide enterprises with comprehensive data protection, multi-cloud mobility, and improved compliance support for applications running on Kubernetes, regardless of whether they are running on premises or in the cloud. New enhancements include:

Application Portability between clouds: PX-Backup delivers application portability between any cloud or on-premises data center. With the latest version, customers can back up Kubernetes applications running in one cloud or data center and restore them in any other.
Improved Compliance via 3-2-1 Backup Rule Support for any storage: The 3-2-1 backup rule is an industry standard for any data protection plan, ensuring recovery from several failure scenarios. With this release, PX-Backup can now offload backups from CSI snapshots to object storage. Enterprises running Kubernetes apps on Portworx PX-Store, any CSI compliant storage service, or cloud-based storage can now use PX-Backup to maintain three copies of data (production, snapshots, backup copy) across both disk and object storage. This provides flexibility to store data offsite (in any cloud), fulfilling the requirements of a 3-2-1 based backup program.
Expanded Recovery with Support for File Shares: In addition to existing capabilities to backup block-based workloads, enterprises can now backup and recover applications running on read-write-many (RWX) persistent volumes provisioned as file shares from FlashBlade, Portworx proxy volumes, or any NFS server.
Improved Protection using PX-Secure: PX-Backup users can now leverage both the role-based access controls and encryption services offered in Portworx PX-Secure, gaining an added layer of security support for their modern applications and the ability to reduce management overhead.

End User Survey: Perspectives on Running Stateful Applications on Kubernetes

Kubernetes continues to play a critical role in driving business agility and resilience as enterprises work to modernize their applications and infrastructure. An end user survey fielded among 500 IT professionals in the U.S. and U.K. found that over half of respondents cited increasing agility (58%) and increasing resilience (52%) as the biggest drivers behind their team’s decision to build and deploy stateful applications on Kubernetes. Key survey findings include:

Impacts to a Company’s Bottom Line: IT Professionals agree that running stateful apps on Kubernetes allows them to develop (54%) and scale (55%) their apps faster, while allowing developers to be more efficient (55%).
Backup & Restore is a Key Requirement: Backup & Restore (55%), Data Mobility and Capacity Management (49%), and High Availability (48%) were identified by IT Professionals as the most critical requirements for stateful apps running on Kubernetes.
Data Mobility and Protection are a Challenge: Data Mobility (29%) is the requirement IT Professionals struggle to achieve the most when running stateful apps on Kubernetes, while Data Protection (46%) is the biggest operational challenge.
Stateful Workloads are Expected to Increase: A majority (87%) of respondents expect the percentage of stateful workloads over the next 12 months to increase, while 9% expect it to stay the same, and only 4% expect it to decrease.

“The latest survey findings underscore the urgency of securing mission-critical Kubernetes applications with a comprehensive data protection and compliance strategy. With the latest PX-Backup enhancements, we’re excited to offer global customers a vendor-agnostic solution to truly manage and secure their modern, yet distributed, Kubernetes infrastructure.” said Murli Thirumale VP and GM, Cloud Native Business Unit, Pure Storage

PX-Backup 2.1 will be available in November 2021. To learn more about PX-Backup and download the full survey data, visit:

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Equinix Makes It Simple for Businesses to Run Kubernetes on Bare Metal Everywhere

Taylor Graham — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 21:17:40 +0000

Equinix, Inc., the world’s digital infrastructure company, announced it has expanded its neutral ecosystem of technologies and partner solutions that support the deployment, management and operations of Kubernetes on Equinix Metal. As a de facto standard for hybrid and multicloud workloads, Kubernetes helps organizations operate and scale their applications across any infrastructure. By expanding support for Kubernetes solutions from leading providers on Equinix Metal, Equinix is making it easier for its more than 10,000 customers to move applications to the edge and closer to the clouds, users, networks and partners that matter most to their business.

“Kubernetes is the go-to deployment substrate for new and evolving applications,” said Mark Coleman, Senior Director of Developer Relations at Equinix Metal. “While Kubernetes initially matured in the public cloud with developer-first companies, leaders across all industries are increasingly utilizing it to accelerate their move toward the edge and operate complex hybrid and multicloud infrastructures. Offering first-class support for Kubernetes on Equinix Metal through a wide variety of partners helps our global customers move faster while maintaining flexibility.”

Building upon more than 20 years of history activating advantage for customers through a neutral, partner-led strategy, Equinix is expanding its Kubernetes ecosystem to help companies simplify hybrid multicloud deployments on a global scale. With fully documented and tested partner solutions by Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere, Google Cloud’s Anthos, Mirantis Container Cloud, SUSE Rancher and K3s, Canonical Kubernetes, IBM Cloud Satellite, Platform9, Rafay and others now available on Equinix Metal, global businesses have both the choice and the stability required to create advantage with their digital infrastructure.

Highlights/Key Facts:

Equinix Metal is an automated, interconnected and secure bare metal service that applies a developer and API-first mindset to foundational infrastructure and provides a fully automated way for digital businesses to access the value of Platform Equinix® via its leading collection of DevOps and open-source integrations.

As more global businesses adopt hybrid multicloud as the architecture of choice, enterprise and cloud native companies alike are turning to Equinix to deliver interconnected digital infrastructure on demand from an ecosystem of providers. To make it easier for companies to run Kubernetes on bare metal and extend their hybrid cloud options, Equinix is continuing to pursue a neutral, partner-first strategy by integrating a variety of solutions from leading Kubernetes providers with Equinix Metal.

Key activities powering the expanded ecosystem of Kubernetes solutions available on Equinix Metal include:

- Equinix Metal included as a launch partner solution for Amazon EKS Anywhere in September 2021. Amazon EKS Anywhere can currently run on VMware vSphere, with support for bare metal expected in 2022.
- Mirantis Container Cloud updated in August 2021 to include Equinix Metal as a default deployment option.
- SUSE Rancher 2.6 announced September 2021 includes an updated UI and powerful new features, including an updated provider for Equinix Metal and associated technical guide.
- In August 2021, the Canonical Juju 2.9.8 release enabled users to deploy, integrate and manage Kubernetes, as well as container and VM-native applications, on Equinix Metal.
- In November 2020, Google Cloud announced general availability of Anthos on bare metal, with Anthos enabled to be deployed on Equinix Metal directly.
- In August 2021, Equinix Metal certified as a solution to run IBM and Red Hat applications with an initial focus on Red Hat OpenShift, delivered via IBM Cloud Satellite.
- In August 2021, the Equinix Metal product was added as a supported cloud within Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK). This followed a new Terraform Module for deploying PMK on Equinix Metal in February 2021.
- The Equinix Metal team joined the major public clouds as a fully supported infrastructure provider on the Gardener Project in September 2021.
- Rafay, Kinvolk Lokomotive, CodeZero and Joyent Triton updated their support in Q3 2021, including documentation and technical guides for deploying on Equinix Metal.
- Cloud Provider Equinix Metal (CPEM) 3.2 released in July 2021 and included dozens of improvements to enable the Equinix Metal partner ecosystem.

Equinix investments in the cloud native community continue to reinforce the company’s commitment to fueling Open Source innovation, including Tinkerbell, a bare metal provisioning platform Equinix donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) program as a sandbox project in November 2020.

Additionally, in November 2020 Equinix tripled its investment in the CNCF’s Community Infrastructure Lab (CIL), enabling innovators throughout the CNCF community to access up to US$1 Million of powerful on-demand infrastructure resources per year across Equinix’s global footprint.

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Pepperdata Introduces Observability and Optimization for GPUs Running Big Data Apps

Taylor Graham — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 18:35:34 +0000

Pepperdata, the leader in big data performance management, announced that the Pepperdata product portfolio now includes the ability to monitor Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) running big data applications like Spark on Kubernetes.

Workloads that harness tremendous amounts of data, such as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, require GPUs, which were originally designed to accelerate graphics rendering. That extra processing power comes with a high price tag, and it requires near constant monitoring for resource waste to get the best performance at the lowest possible cost.

Pepperdata now monitors GPU performance, providing the visibility needed for Spark applications running on Kubernetes and utilizing the processing power of GPUs. With this new visibility, companies can improve the performance of their Spark apps running on those GPUs and manage costs at a granular level.

Unlike traditional infrastructure monitoring, which is limited to the platform, the Pepperdata solution provides visibility into GPU resource utilization at the application level. Pepperdata also provides instant recommendations for optimization. Features include:

Visibility into GPU memory usage and waste
Fine-tuning of GPU usage through end-user recommendations
Ability to attribute usage and cost to specific end-users

“Spark on Kubernetes is quickly becoming a dominant part of the compute infrastructure as data-intensive ML and AI applications proliferate,” said Ash Munshi, CEO, Pepperdata. “GPUs can handle these workloads, but they are expensive to buy and are power-intensive. Until now, there hasn’t been a way to view and manage the infrastructure and applications, which can lead to unnecessary waste and overspending for big data workloads. With Pepperdata, organizations can properly size their GPU hardware investments and have the confidence that they are utilizing them well.”

There are products on the market for monitoring GPUs, but they typically lack long-term storage, the ability to scale, and often do not correlate infrastructure metrics to applications. Pepperdata solves these problems with insight for data center operators, data scientists, and ML/AI developers. They can now understand who is using what resources, optimize to eliminate waste so jobs can be tuned and prioritized, and make sure costs are assigned appropriately to the right users or groups across the enterprise.

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New Survey Shows Enterprises Adopting Kubernetes for Big Data Cloud Migration, Cost Reduction

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Sysdig Announces First Automated Cloud Native Service Integrations for Prometheus Monitoring

Taylor Graham — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 23:13:55 +0000

Sysdig, Inc., the secure DevOps leader, announced significant enhancements to Sysdig Monitor, which radically simplifies Prometheus adoption with a new integrations manager, simplified querying, and long-term metric storage for its managed Prometheus service.

Prometheus is fast becoming the tool of choice to monitor Kubernetes-based workloads as organizations build modern cloud applications. Developers and SREs rely on Prometheus as an open standard for monitoring that provides broad capabilities and helps avoid vendor lock-in. However, as Prometheus environments proliferate throughout an organization, managing the infrastructure, exporters, dashboards, and alerts becomes complex and time consuming. In addition, organizations struggle with long-term storage of time series, information silos, and lack of a global view of the health of their environment across all applications and infrastructure. Learning PromQL (the query language of Prometheus) and how to use it effectively can take months, reducing the ability of teams to properly analyze their metrics.

Sysdig is solving these problems with new enhancements to its managed Prometheus service. Organizations can now break free from the burden of setting up and managing monitoring tools and instead focus scarce engineering resources on innovation. In addition, developer and DevOps teams that need deep visibility into cloud-native applications save time with an easy way to understand performance and health with a single view across services, clusters, and clouds.

First-Of-Its-Kind Integrations Manager

Sysdig Monitor now provides automatic discovery and assisted deployment of Prometheus monitoring integrations along with preconfigured dashboards, alerts, and a new integrations management interface. Sysdig is the first company to build integration management functionality based on open source Prometheus exporters, displacing proprietary integrations and app checks. By automating integration discovery and configuration management, customers can save hundreds of hours of effort while maintaining an open approach for the integrations they deploy.

PromQL Explorer for Querying

Sysdig is simplifying the way teams interact with metrics to speed mean time to discover (MTTD). Sysdig makes it easier to both learn and use PromQL by introducing the PromQL Explorer for users to quickly craft queries, zero in on what’s important, then instantly add those queries to dashboards and alerts. In addition, the new PromQL Library helps to discover popular queries from the monitoring community to learn new ways to get to the information that really matters.

Simplified Labeling

Sysdig is also introducing the ability to add automatic labels at the time of ingestion to help customers reduce the complexity of their PromQL queries by up to 90%. Customers can now use PromQL or a form-based UI to inspect all their metrics no matter the data source. This provides universal access for a range of users, from developers to architects, with different experience levels.

Long Term Storage For Existing Prometheus Deployments

Lastly, Sysdig is adding support for Prometheus remote_write so organizations can offload Prometheus metrics to Sysdig for long term storage. Users can push custom metrics into the Sysdig backend for visibility without installing an agent. The number of custom metrics can now be increased dynamically with flexible billing options, allowing organizations to accommodate unplanned custom metrics growth without surprise bills.

Native Prometheus Compatibility

Unlike other vendors, Sysdig Monitor is natively compatible with Prometheus. Customers can enjoy the best of both worlds by maintaining their existing investment in Prometheus while gaining the simplicity and enterprise support that Sysdig adds to the equation. At the same time, customers will be able to free up valuable people-resources to concentrate on business critical applications instead of mundane monitoring infrastructure.

“Meeting user expectations for availability and performance requires complete visibility into infrastructure, services, and applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Saravanan Subbiah, Vice President of Engineering and Technology at Sysdig. “As organizations move from proprietary monitoring approaches to DIY open source, the resource requirements can spiral out of control. SREs and developers need an easy-to-use Prometheus monitoring service that is radically simple to integrate into DevOps workflows without breaking open source standards.”

“We were so busy expanding and trying to meet the demand for our internal applications teams that we didn’t really have a lot of spare cycles to figure out a scaling solution for Prometheus, so we started taking a look at commercial options. Since Sysdig Monitor’s managed Prometheus service is based on open standards we didn’t have to worry about re-tooling our monitoring environment.” – Tiziano Tarolla, Senior Development Manager, SAP Concur

In addition to the Sysdig SaaS solution, the new Prometheus capabilities are now available in IBM Cloud Monitoring, IBM’s cloud-native, container-intelligence management system built on Sysdig Monitor.

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