Gravity Now Packages Multiple Kubernetes Apps in One Image File

Open source vendor Gravitational has bolstered its Gravity Kubernetes packaging application to now allow developers to package multiple Kubernetes applications and clusters into single image files that can then be deployed and replicated across multiple environments at once.

The new capabilities have been added to the latest release of Gravity 5.5, which adds support for the open source package manager Helm to allow developers to package entire Kubernetes clusters, pre-loaded with applications into downloadable image files, according to the company.

Gravitational’s Ev Kontsevoy

For developers, this allows development teams to copy an entire application catalogue and easily replicate it into any preferred cloud deployment target, including groups of servers, storage volumes, load balancers or other resources, Ev Kontsevoy, CEO and co-founder of Gravitational, told Channel Futures.

“Sometimes it’s an AWS account,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a VMware private cloud, sometimes it’s an OpenStack cluster and sometimes it’s just a rack of bare metal servers in a data center.”

One of the top strengths of this approach, said Kontsevoy, is that image-based deployments allow applications to be deployed into restricted environments, such as in another organization’s infrastructure.

“Traditional Kubernetes deployments only work when developers have full access to the infrastructure,” he said. “Gravity removes this restriction,” allowing developers to build complex cloud-native applications and then publish them as a downloadable Kubernetes Appliance, which can then be downloaded by enterprise buyers to install on their own public or private cloud, according to Kontsevoy.

“Developers can build an application for their own organization and publish its image for the internal ops team to create thousands of 100% identical Kubernetes clusters,” he said. “This dramatically reduces the operational overhead of managing a large number of Kubernetes clusters, especially when compliance is important because all Gravity clusters are 100% identical to each other.”

So far, Gravitational doesn’t have a formal channel program or strategy in place, but several small systems integrators, including Cloud Posse and CloudOps, have announced that they are working with customers to integrate Gravitational’s products.

A growing number of companies say they are offering products to make Kubernetes easier to use for IT departments, including products that use web user interfaces on top of Kubernetes APIs, said Kontsevoy. “That makes it somewhat easier for engineers to play with this technology in the lab, but these offerings do not add much value for production workloads.

Gravity takes a different approach, he said, by focusing on using automating to remove complexity and then hiding it inside a cluster image which runs by itself. “Gravity injects its own Kubernetes Hypervisor into each image — you can think about it as a robot that manages your Kubernetes cluster for you,” he said.

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