Mirantis Adds Support Options for k0smotron Control Plane
At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference today, Mirantis made available two support options for the open source k0smotron control plane it developed for Kubernetes clusters.
Shaun O’Meara, field CTO for Mirantis, said now that k0smotron is mature enough to be deployed in production environments, the company has opted to provide enterprise IT organizations with support for the lightweight control plane that is more extensible than existing alternatives.
Mirantis is offering OpsCare, which provides 24/7 proactive support, and OpsCare Plus, which is a fully managed 24/7 service.
Originally developed to manage lightweight K0s instances of Kubernetes that Mirantis developed, the k0smotron control plane can now be applied to any type of Kubernetes cluster. The k0smotron operator is deployed on a Kubernetes cluster and can then be extended to worker nodes by making it possible to deploy a virtual instance of the control plane that runs like any other workload, said O’Meara.
That approach also makes it possible to extend the reach of the primary control plane more easily across a distributed computing environment, he added. In fact, the primary control plane and worker node extensions do not have to run on the same infrastructure, making k0smotron ideal for centralizing the management of Kubernetes clusters across a hybrid cloud computing environment in a way that is more cost-effective, noted O’Meara.
This ‘Kubernetes within Kubernetes’ approach also serves to further commoditize Kubernetes clusters at a time when more enterprise IT organizations than ever are deploying them in production environments, he added. In fact, control planes will play a major role in enabling IT teams to embrace platform engineering as a methodology for centralizing the management of DevOps processes, said O’Meara.
Widely employed by cloud service providers, enterprise IT teams are now starting to embrace control planes as an alternative to writing scripts to manage IT infrastructure. That capability makes it possible to streamline the management of hybrid cloud computing environments in a way that reduces the total cost of IT. Instead of requiring specialists to manage each platform, a control plane that can be applied across a hybrid cloud computing environment reduces the size of the IT staff that might otherwise be required to master the tools needed to manage different platforms.
Ultimately, the goal is to enable organizations to spend more time developing applications versus managing infrastructure, said O’Meara.
It’s not clear how quickly enterprise IT organizations are embracing control planes, but during turbulent economic times, more IT teams are under pressure to reduce IT costs. The most expensive element of any IT budget is labor, so streamlining the management of IT infrastructure usually becomes a higher priority whenever there is an economic downturn.
The challenge, of course, is being able to deliver a return on investment on those efforts in a manner that is timely enough for finance and IT leaders to appreciate, so Mirantis is betting a lot more organizations will prefer a managed service versus trying to manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters on their own.
