UPDATED 08:00 EDT / AUGUST 29 2017

CLOUD

Pivotal, Google and VMware team up on software container service

Pivotal, which helps companies build software to run in public and private clouds, today announced a new service to deploy applications in software “containers” to run on Google Inc.’s cloud service and on VMware Inc.’s vSphere suite of virtualization services.

The new Pivotal Container Service will enable companies to create software containers, which wrap applications in a software bundle so they can run easily across public clouds and so-called private clouds inside data centers, using the Google-developed open-source container manager Kubernetes. It’s intended to help companies migrate applications to both the Google Cloud Platform and VMware’s Vsphere suite of virtualization technologies that emulate a computer system in software for more efficient use of servers in corporate data centers.

The service was due to be announced this morning at VMware’s VMworld conference for customers and partners in Las Vegas. Pivotal and VMware are subsidiaries of Dell following the computer giant’s huge acquisition of storage giant EMC Corp. last year.

Essentially, Pivotal Container Service is a commercial version of Kubo, an open-source project developed by Google and Pivotal starting last November. James Watters (pictured), senior vice president of products for Pivotal, said in an interview that to date, Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, an open-source cloud development platform originally created by VMware, hasn’t offered containers as a service to date for tasks such as running the open-source data processing engine Apache Spark.

Paul Fazzone, general manager of cloud native applications at VMware, added that one of the advantages of the new service will be the ability to create containers quickly and easily instead of having to provision physical servers for them in a data center. “Instead of building a bunch of McMansions, you’re getting a hotel environment,” he told SiliconANGLE.

Despite the rapid rise in popularity of open-source Kubernetes, most large enterprises are looking for a commercially supported service, said International Data Corp. research manager Gary Chen, and that’s what the Pivotal service is intended to provide.

The service will be generally available in the fourth quarter for enterprises as a freestanding product sold directly by both Pivotal and VMware that can integrate with Cloud Foundry and VMware’s software-defined data center infrastructure.

VMware will contribute engineering help and team up with Pivotal and Google to develop Kubo. For its part, Google said it will maintain compatibility between the Pivotal service and Google’s own container engine, a managed service that uses the latest release of Kubernetes. “We see a powerful container ecosystem emerging,” Sam Ramji, vice president of product management for developer platforms at Google Cloud, said during a Tuesday morning keynote at VMworld. But he said it depends on a way for companies to run their applications on private and multiple public clouds the same way, something that requires that constant compatibility.

Pivotal recently said revenue from Cloud Foundry rose 130 percent last year, to $270 million, making it the key driver of its business. Dell owns a bit over 50 percent of Pivotal, the rest split among General Electric Co., Ford Motor Co., Microsoft Corp. and VMware. According to some reports, Pivotal, valued at more than $3 billion, is considering an initial public offering of shares by the middle of next year.

(* Disclosure: SiliconANGLE Media’s video unit, theCUBE, is a paid media partner at VMworld. Stories on SiliconANGLE are written independently of coverage on theCUBE. Sponsors have no editorial influence on content on SiliconANGLE or theCUBE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU