Kubernetes for containers; Kubernetes for data; Kubernetes for multicloud. Is there anything Kubernetes can’t do?

In real-life deployments, bare-naked Kubernetes isn’t the super power it’s cracked up to be. The trending method for running distributed software applications needs help from distribution channels and ecosystem tools, according to Stephan Fabel (pictured), director of product management at Canonical Ltd.

“Kubernetes, in and of itself, is a mechanism to enable [software] developers. It plays one part in the whole software development lifecycle,” Fabel said. Distributors of Kubernetes must fill in all the little potholes in the whole life cycle and ecosystem.

Where should users deploy Kubernetes? How do they life-cycle manage it? Take the recent security issue that briefly rocked Kubernetes. It was so quickly resolved, not because of any integral, baked-in Kubernetes feature. “That acceleration is not solved by Kubernetes; it’s solved for Kubernetes,” Fabel said. 

Fabel spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed Canonical’s recent announcements and how its distribution enhances Kubernetes. (* Disclosure below.)

K8s on your workstation in a snap

Canonical released version 1.13 of its Charmed Distribution of Kubernetes recently. This release includes MicroK8s — Kubernetes in a single snap for workstations. 

MicroK8s enables developers to quickly stand up a Kubernetes cluster on their workstation. Artificial-intelligence and machine-learning workloads can go from the workstation all the way to on-premises environments and public cloud.

“It ended up being quite obvious to us that if we do this in a snap, then we actually can also tie this into appliances and devices at the edge,” Fabel said. “Now we’re looking at interesting new use cases for Kubernetes at the edge as an actual [application user interface] end point.”

Charmed distro offers a single operational paradigm that allows Kubernetes to work anywhere — on-prem, cloud, virtual substrates, and now on workstations.

This takes container usage to a new level, according to Fabel. “I know how to deploy my applications in multiple ways because it’s always the same API. But how do I actually manage a lot of Kubernetes clusters and a lot of Kubernetes API end points all over the place?” he asked.

Charmed is answering that for users, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Canonical Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Canonical nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE