Mirantis Adds KubeVirt to Further Streamline Management of Kubernetes Environments
Mirantis has updated its lightweight instance of Kubernetes to include support for KubeVirt, an open-source tool that makes it possible to encapsulate virtual machines.
Based on k0s, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE) 4 also adds support for encrFIPS 140-2 encryption.
Additionally, Mirantis is working toward creating a more advanced control plane for Kubernetes clusters, dubbed Mirtantis Project 2A, that promises to make it possible to centralize the management of Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they are deployed or what distributions for Kubernetes are being employed. In effect, Project 2A provides a control plane capable of invoking multiple other control planes across a heterogenous Kubernetes environment.
Mirantis CTO Shaun O’Meara said the overall MKE goal is to make it simpler for emerging platform engineering teams to embrace a managed service that streamlines not just the management of Kubernetes itself, but also the entire stack of software running above it, including KubeVirt and open source Prometheus monitoring software. That approach eliminates the potential for configuration drift that would otherwise naturally occur as individual development teams update various configurations every time an application is updated, he added. MKE 4 clusters are continually reconciled against their declarative configurations to prevent those drifts from occurring, noted O’Meara.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations are embracing KubeVirt to run legacy monolithic applications on Kubernetes clusters but there is an argument to be made for reducing costs by standardizing on a single platform. Many organizations, for example, are evaluating the cost of converting virtual machines from VMware into open-source kernel-based virtual machines that would enable their monolithic applications to run on the same platform as their cloud-native applications.
The latest update to KubeVirt also added capabilities that streamline the management of virtual machines using a declarative application programming interface (API) as well as a quota tool that limits the amount of infrastructure a workload is allowed to consume.
Ultimately, Mirantis is betting that MKE will gain traction as more organizations embrace platform engineering to manage IT environments. A Techstrong Research survey finds that 61% of the DevOps practitioners surveyed work for organizations that are already applying platform engineering principles across all or some element of their IT operations. Improving developer productivity (59%), the need for standardization of configurations (58%), reducing costs (51%), decreasing the increased complexity of modern applications (49%) and improving security (48%) are all cited as primary drivers of adoption.
MKE 4 essentially provides those teams with a set of composable blueprints that makes centrally managing Kubernetes environments simpler, at a time when there is more focus than ever on simplifying the management of IT, said O’Meara.
Regardless of motivation, there is little doubt that much of the enthusiasm for platform engineering is being driven by the complexity associated with managing Kubernetes. After all, while there may be some full-stack developers capable of writing code and managing infrastructure, the bulk of the application developer community still generally prefers to focus their time and effort on business logic.
