Scaleway Launches Bare-Metal Kubernetes Service

Scaleway, a provider of cloud service based in France, has made available a bare-metal instance of Kubernetes clusters accessed as a service.

Company CEO Yann Lechelle says the Kubernetes Kapsule service is designed to give IT organizations inside and out of France access to a bare-metal instance of Kubernetes that makes it easier to meet compliance mandates that require IT assets to be located in certain locations, such as within the European Union, for example.

Based on a distribution of Kubernetes certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the Kubernetes Kapsule service provides IT teams with an alternative to cloud service providers that make Kubernetes available as an extension of a service based on virtual machines, Lechelle says.

Kubernetes Kapsule also provides support for automatic sizing of nodes, and the company only charges for compute, storage and networking resources. The Control Plane for Kubernetes Kapsule is made available free of charge.

Scaleway has also designed Kubernetes Kapsule to include an auto-healing capability that enables a cluster to automatically recover and return to its initial state. Other features include access to either NGINX or Traefik proxy servers as ingress controllers and up to four different container network interfaces (CNIs).

Finally, Scaleway also provides access to block storage, load balancer and container registries that are also made available as a service.

Lechelle says Kubernetes as a service is only the latest platform to emerge as part of a larger infrastructure-as-a-code phenomenon that has transformed the way IT is managed. DevOps teams now can programmatically invoke cloud resources almost anywhere in the world. In the case of Kubernetes, many of those DevOps teams are looking for bare-metal instances of Kubernetes that minimize application latency as much as possible.

Scaleway, like most cloud service providers, offers a wide range of services. However, only a relatively small number make Kubernetes available on a bare-metal platform. Most of the largest cloud service providers are trying to leverage extensive investments in virtual machines to run both monolithic and microservices-based applications based on Kubernetes on the same infrastructure. In many cases, that approach is perfectly fine. However, there is a growing number of developers who tend to view virtual machines as overhead that unnecessarily consumes compute and storage resources.

The one thing that is for certain is more containerized applications will be heading into the cloud in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic regardless of cost. Many organizations now view public clouds as a means to ensure application availability without requiring IT staff to visit a local data center. Given the fact that no one knows whether there might be another pandemic, many organizations now, in fact, view the cloud as a strategic element of their business continuity strategy.

Of course, no one is sure to what degree new applications will be developed during the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, chances are high that whatever applications are developed, the bulk of them will be designed to take advantage of cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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