Organizations today are thinking about application development in new, different, and exciting ways compared to traditional development processes and procedures. Today’s environments are using and implementing new technologies that are helping to modernize the app development lifecycle. In the past several years, we have seen a major infrastructure and platform evolution that has helped to speed along these changes in the enterprise and across the board. We have seen virtualization mature to a point of being the de facto standard in providing a platform for enterprise architecture.
Cloud environments are now standard among most organizations as they are using the cloud as a standard way to move forward very quickly and with agility in provisioning new infrastructure and scaling environments in an elastic way. Cloud is being designed into most products, services, and new technologies that are brought to market across the board. On top of the cloud, there is the whole container movement that is allowing for an even more nimble platform for developers. With the container orchestration war now basically being won by Kubernetes, most solutions are standardizing on the Kubernetes platform for container orchestration. VMware has made some pretty giant strides in the technologies that integrate with vSphere and allow customers to take advantage of these new technologies on the horizon such as containers for application development. There are a few container technologies that allow customers to decide how they want to implement containers on top of VMware vSphere.
In this post, we will take a look at these various container technologies to see the advantages and potential use cases of each solution.
VMware vSphere Container App Modernization
As mentioned, there are various solutions from a VMware perspective that allow customers to modernize application development and benefit from all the features and capabilities of the VMware vSphere infrastructure stack. VMware has made some strategic moves in regards to containers over the past couple of years to allow effectively using the vSphere platform for running containers.
There are basically three solutions that are found in the VMware vSphere ecosystem that allow using containers for app modernization.
- vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC)
- VMware Pivotal Container Services (PKS)
- Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)
Each of these above solutions has various strengths and particular use cases that they may cater to in the enterprise.
Let’s take a closer look at each solution and see how each is able to solve some of the application development challenges in the app modernization movement.
vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC)
The vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) solution has been around perhaps the longest and allows running containers as you would run VMware virtual machines inside the VMware vSphere environment. This allows VMware administrators to utilize the familiar tooling, features, and functionality found in VMware vSphere for managing both virtual machines and containers as well. The container itself is deployed as a lightweight virtual machine.
A couple of years ago and even down to today, many keep asking, who will win the war, virtual machines or containers?
However, the solution is really not that simple and most enterprise environments will not use simply one over the other exclusively. They both have viable use cases that are associated with them. In fact, containers and virtual machines are actually better used together from a security perspective. Since containers share the kernel of the container host, from an isolation perspective, it is better to dedicate a lightweight container host to the container so that separation is possible between containers, such as in a multi-tenant environment. From a long-running, persistence perspective, running the service inside of a virtual machine is better suited for this application as well.
VMware is not alone in recognizing the benefit of running containers inside of virtual machines. Microsoft has recognized the security and other benefits to running containers inside virtual machines as well. Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V introduced the Hyper-V Containers concept that officially introduced this feature into Hyper-V. Security and isolation is the driving force behind this in the Windows world as well.
There are downsides to a vSphere Integrated Containers installation on the side of orchestration and scheduling. The vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) solution is simply a container runtime API and has no mechanism for orchestration and scheduling the containers ran therein. The VIC solution is a great solution for moving towards repackaging traditional applications. However, VIC requires a high degree of manual involvement with the platform from an orchestration, management, and scheduling perspective since those mechanisms are not built into the solution.
Pivotal Container Service (PKS)
The VMware Pivotal Container Service is purpose-built to deliver Kubernetes orchestrated containers to the VMware vSphere environment. This allows VMware and Pivotal to provide a turnkey solution for both day-1 and day-2 operations. Kubernetes is the leader among enterprise environments today as the solution of choice for container orchestration and scheduling. It has all but won the war in this space. Most who are looking to spin up container clusters are looking at using Kubernetes as the orchestrator.
The Pivotal Container Service (PKS) solution allows very easily standing up a Kubernetes solution on top of vSphere. Additionally, PKS provides additional benefits such as tight integration with other VMware solutions such as NSX-V and NSX-T to provide the networking functionality that allows plumbing connectivity to the container environment as well as securing that traffic.
If you are looking at a Kubernetes-based solution for running containers, the Pivotal Container Service definitely provides a much more turn-key solution for provisioning this type of container environment. It still requires that organizations build their own application platforms including CI/CD integration as well.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)
Taking the solution a step further up the stack is the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) solution. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a full-stack, cloud-native solution for deploying cloud-native applications. PCF allows customers to have the fully integrated and streamlined solution that includes and automates the CI/CD deployment, containerization, networking, operating system images and more, so developers can turn out applications with even greater speed and agility. PCF includes the abilities and enterprise characteristics of the PKS solution and also includes a complete set of development tools for the developers. With PCF, there are no do-it-yourself operations that need to take place. It is a fully managed, container creation from source code, services, and service binding, CI/CD integration solution as a service. Developers simply push code to the platform and it takes care of the rest.
Concluding Thoughts
VMware provides some powerful modern app solutions that allow organizations to have access to the newest application development tools and platforms in an infrastructure model they know and love – VMware vSphere. Additionally, running on top of vSphere allows organizations to take advantage of the features and functionality built into vSphere and apply these strengths to their container implementations. As shown, there are various flavors of container implementations with VMware. The VIC, PKS, and PCF solutions all have their strengths and use cases in the enterprise. Each solution basically allows for various levels of necessary administration and interaction to provision containers, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines. Depending on the use case and how organizations want to interact with containers, one of the solutions may be a better fit based on the descriptions covered above.
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