Kubernetes and the Enterprise

I had an interesting conversation with a CSP provider recently, Microsoft. The topic was Kubernetes uptake based on their experience with their offering Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).  

The observation, Kubernetes uptake was high, but higher with smaller and medium size businesses than with the large enterprise. The take-away from this was that while Kubernetes was an excellent platform for the operational it doesn’t span into the application realm. What was meant was that Kubernetes doesn’t really help with the building, packaging, and deployment of the containerized applications as application sets.  

The reason we were having this conversation was around SUSE’s Cloud Application Platform (CAP). This is our Kubernetes focused Cloud Foundry distribution. And as part of the Kubernetes focus, we have been supporting and running SUSE CAP on Azure’s AKS for the last year or so.  

The conversation continued with observations that Kubernetes was clearly the future across IT. Yet to date, Cloud Foundry still has a good following with the large enterprise. And the thinking was that the Cloud Foundry approach really helped the large enteprise work with their applications, even if the applications were purely ‘container’ applications. Cloud Foundry makes the container-side of managing your ‘container’ application transparent. This approach ultimately lowers the tasks, breadth of tooling, and knowledge you have to surround Kubernetes with. It was with this thought, that a light-bulb went on. 

SUSE Cloud Application Platform is a Kubernetes application, but one with roots that come from Cloud Foundry. So, instead of looking at SUSE CAP as a Cloud Foundry that can run in AKS, look at it from the Kubernetes side. 

SUSE Cloud Application Platform is a drop-in solution that fulfills on the needed Kubernetes additions. It facilitates managing container applications fully from an application point of view.  

With SUSE CAP, you can point it at code and let it take care of the rest; compiling, packaging, building the containers, and then deploying and starting the application. (Or push the packaged and built application images into a registry if so desired.) SUSE CAP brings the Enterprise tooling to complete your container infrastructure and turns Kubernetes into an application friendly and aware platform.  

And as a main point early in this conversation, this fills a gap for the large enterprise.