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Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 6: Kubernetes Go!

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In this article, we will walk through the two workflows, one from the perspective of the Cloud/Platform Operator and how to create a new PKS Cluster to how it will be consumed by the Developer which is simply accessing the Kubernetes API endpoint and does not have to know anything about how it was provisioned or even access to the underlying PKS infrastructure. I think most of you have probably been waiting for this part of the series to see PKS in action and demonstrate how easy it is to manage and consume K8S Clusters.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

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Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 5: PKS Control Plane

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Continuing with our PKS installation, we are now going to finish up with configuring and deploying the PKS Control Plane Tile which provides a frontend API that will be used by Cloud/Platform Operators to easily interact with PKS for provisioning and managing (create, delete, list, scale up/down) Kubernetes (K8S) Clusters. Once a K8S Cluster has successfully been deployed through PKS, operators simply provide their developers the external hostname of the K8S Cluster and the kubectl configuration file and they can immediately start deploying applications without knowing anything about PKS and how it works! If an application that a developer is deploying requires an external load balancer service, they can easily specify that in their application deployment YAML file and behind the scenes, PKS will automatically provision on-demand an NSX-T Load Balancer to service the application and this is completely seamless and does not require any additional assistance from the operator.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

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Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 4: Ops Manager & BOSH

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In this article, we will begin our PKS installation by deploying Pivotal Ops Manager which provides a management interface (UI/API) for Cloud/Platform Operators to manage the complete lifecycle of both BOSH and PKS from install, patch and upgrade. In addition, you can also deploy new application services using Ops Manager Tiles like adding an Enterprise-class Container Registry like VMware Harbor which can then be configured to work with PKS or any other solution that you may have deployed using Ops Manager.

As part of the the Ops Manager deployment, we will also install the BOSH Tile which is responsible for managing, provisioning, monitoring and self-healing of the VMs that make up a Kubernetes (K8S) Cluster deployment within PKS. BOSH supports a number of IaaS platforms which includes vSphere and through their Cloud Provider Interface (CPI), it will ensure the VMs are always up and in some cases, it may even delete and simply re-deploy VMs if they become unresponsive. This is all done completely automated without any interaction from the Cloud/Platform Operator which means for Developers, they can rest assure whatever SLA or High Availability options that have been defined as part of their application deployment, the underlying platform will ensure those requirements will always be met.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

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