VMworld 2019 kicked off with a bang this week in San Francisco, California. The first day’s keynotes were packed with announcements, but the one that really excited me was Project Pacific.
Project Pacific
Project Pacific (in Tech Preview) is the re-architecting of vSphere, evolving it into a native Kubernetes platform. It will help vAdmins (and the IT organization) provide a blank slate-type environment to their development teams, basically providing the platform from which to build a cloud-like environment. The goal of Project Pacific is to provide these capabilities:
- vSphere with Native Kubernetes
- Application-focused Management
- Dev and IT Ops collaboration
This is not Kubernetes stapled or bolted on to vSphere, this will make Kubernetes a first class citizen within ESXi. Kubernetes will become the control plane of vSphere. So developers will use Kubernetes like they always have, but IT admins will use vCenter to manage their vSphere environments like they always did just with new components to manage.
Namespaces in vSphere?
Since Kubernetes will be native in vSphere, the concept of namespaces will be available. Namespaces in Kubernetes is a collection of objects (containers, VMs, disks, etc). But how cool would it be if you took namespaces, and applied all the operations available to VMs (control resource allocation, vMotion, Encryption, HA, and snapshots) to them?
Making the private cloud real
What excites me most about this is that now the private cloud can be real, IT can provide a cloud operating model to their developers. This means developers can take advantage of Kubernetes while taking advantage of on-premises benefits such as low latency and the ability to adhere to compliance or security rules.
Find out more at VMworld
For more information, and a list of sessions this week and other content, check out Kit Colbert’s blog post as well as Jared Rosoff’s technical overview.