VMware CaaS Offering – PKS

Recently, VMware announced the next version of its on-premise CaaS offering PKS 1.3. This is the 3 major release of PKS since its announcement in VMworld 2017. Since, then PKS has seen tremendous innovation and 1.3 release is a testimonial to it.

Quick highlight of what the new version comes with:

Component	Details
PKS version	v1.3.0
Ops Manager versions	v2.3.1+, v2.4.0+
Stemcell version	v170.15
Kubernetes version	v1.12.4
Docker version	v18.06.1-ce (CFCR)
On-Demand Broker version	v0.24
NSX-T versions*	v2.2, v2.3.0.2, v2.3.1
NCP version	v2.3.1
vSphere versions	v6.7.0, v6.7 U1 v6.5 U1, v6.5 U2

PKS uses CFCR (Cloud Foundation Container Runtime), an open source project that provides a solution for deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters using BOSH. While lot of customer still then they can use open source K8s and build a platform of CaaS. While it looks very simply and easy for enterprise they have to solve other problems which can’t be solved by vanilla K8s.

Feature	Included in K8s	Included in PKS
Single tenant ingress	✓	✓
Secure multi-tenant ingress		✓
Stateful sets of pods	✓	✓
Multi-container pods	✓	✓
Rolling upgrades to pods	✓	✓
Rolling upgrades to cluster infrastructure		✓
Pod scaling and high availability	✓	✓
Cluster provisioning and scaling		✓
Monitoring and recovery of cluster VMs and processes		✓
Persistent disks	✓	✓
Secure container registry		✓
Embedded, hardened operating system		✓

PKS overall architecture can be easily understood by looking at the below components. Interesting piece is the little ‘Service Broker’ sitting next to K8’s cluster above BOSH which is interacting with all the external services. In v1.0 the service broker could talk to GCP platform, which later expanded to AWS. in PKS v1.3 the service broker has extended to Azure for IaaS.

Screenshot 2019-02-05 at 11.57.39 PM