VMware Inc. and its Dell Technologies Inc. sister Pivotal Software Inc. are updating their jointly developed Pivotal Container Service with features aimed at addressing developer productivity, high availability, management and operations, and networking and security.

The service, dubbed PKS, helps organizations easily create software containers that bundle applications together in a way that enables them to be run anywhere, and deploy them across public and private clouds. PKS relies on the open-source container orchestration platform Kubernetes to manage those containers.

VMware built PKS in collaboration with Pivotal and also Google LLC, which originally created Kubernetes. PKS is a managed service which makes use of the Kubo open-source project for Kubernetes management. Kubo brings Pivotal’s BOSH deployment technology to Kubernetes. Enterprises can use the service to migrate applications to and from Google Cloud Platform and VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform, which emulates computer systems in order to gain more efficiency from data center servers.

PKS was first launched in beta last year before being generally released in February.

“A purpose-built container solution to operationalize Kubernetes for multicloud enterprises and service providers, PKS can significantly simplify the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters with day 1 and day 2 operations support,” Narayan Mandaleeka, a group product line manager at VMware, said in a blog post announcing the updates.

PKS 1.1, based on the new Kubernetes 1.10 release, adds a new integration with VMware’s Log Insight product in order to ease operations and management. That provides users with greater visibility into containers running on the platform through traceability and monitoring features enabled by intelligent data tagging.

Another new feature is the integration of VMware’s open-source Harbor container registry, which provides a more secure way to manage and deploy container images. Harbor is currently a candidate to become a Cloud Native Computing Foundation-hosted project. The release also comes with multiple availability zone support for the first time.

“Kubernetes has won the container standards war, and now we’re in phase two of this story, with vendors revving their own releases whenever a new Kubernetes version comes out,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “In this case PKS 1.10 reflects the basic changes which came with Google Kubernetes Engine 1.10. Like all vendors, Pivotal and VMware have to show value ad beyond the pure deployment of Kubernetes, which they do with the number of performance and monitoring enhancements.”

In any case, the competition is beneficial for customers. “All of this is good news for companies that want to deploy next-generation applications on Kubernetes,” he said.

PKS 1.1 is available immediately, the companies said.

Image: VMware