If enterprise applications go to the cloud, if traditional technologies are still adopted, then the cost, efficiency, and agility of Cloud Native technology will not be able to take full advantage of, and the effect of going to the cloud will be greatly reduced.
Therefore, Ding Yu (Uncle Tong), a researcher of Alibaba Cloud Native Application Platform, made it clear at the 2020 Alibaba Cloud Online Summit: “Cloud native technology represented by containers has become the shortest path to release the value of cloud. Cloud native helps enterprises comprehensively Embrace cloud computing."
As an advanced virtualization technology, Container has become the standard infrastructure for software development and operation and maintenance in the cloud-native era. Now, more and more companies are beginning to pay attention to and use container technology to accelerate digital transformation. Some companies such as Toutiao, Didi Chuxing, JD.com, etc. have taken containers and Kubernetes (K8S) as their technological focus and are rapidly expanding into new areas.
In 2020, container technology will further expand its boundaries and enter the field of AI and edge computing. Will cloud native technologies represented by containers accelerate the implementation of AI+IoT and create a bright new world?
01
SUSE completes acquisition of Rancher, focusing on edge innovation
On December 2, two leading open source companies in the world announced the completion of the merger. The open source innovation company SUSE completed the acquisition of Rancher, the market leader in the Kubernetes management field, which will bring the industry a new product of the Linux operating system and Kubernetes (K8S) management platform combination.
Industry professionals estimate that SUSE will have to pay at least $600 million. The transaction shows that even during the economic winter, the demand for technology that enables the company to operate more efficiently remains high.
From a business perspective, both SUSE and Rancher are open source software companies, and both have common pursuits in the direction of open source software business development, and their growth rates are amazing.
SUSE is a Linux distribution company controlled by the private equity company EQT. It has a glorious history of 28 years. It has been focusing on open source innovation, providing support for mission-critical applications and systems, and is widely embedded in equipment worldwide, such as automobiles and medical care. among. In 2017, SUSE launched its own service to manage containers.
SUSE recently announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2020, and global performance continues to grow. Cloud ACV (annual contract value) bookings continued to grow, with a growth rate of 87%, achieving 15 consecutive quarters of cloud ACV year-on-year growth.
Rancher Labs provides open source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes on a large scale on any infrastructure in the data center, cloud, branch office, and network edge. Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration platform in the world.
Rancher's core software draws on the Kubernetes container management software released by Google in 2014 under an open source license. In February 2019, Rancher launched K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution. The company said that people downloaded the software more than 100 million times and claimed that its annualized revenue in 2019 increased by 169%. Rancher also provides its own small Linux operating system distribution.
The container becomes the link between the two companies and brings the container into the hybrid cloud and edge computing field.
In the past few years, with the rise of emerging companies such as Docker, containers have become an alternative to traditional virtualization technologies for running applications on every server in the company's data center, cloud, etc. Cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba Cloud, and Tencent Cloud have all launched corresponding container services. Developers can use these services to put code into containers to facilitate application operation and migration.
Rancher was named an outstanding leader in the "Forrester New Wave: Multi-cloud Container Management Platform" report released recently. It provides open source container management software that enables organizations to operate on any infrastructure in the data center, cloud, branch office, and network edge Deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale.
Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technology and Product Officer of SUSE, said: "Kubernetes expands the ecosystem of components and tools, reducing the burden of developing and running applications in public and private clouds."
"With container technology, IT teams can quickly and predictably deploy and manage applications, dynamically expand them, seamlessly introduce new features, and optimize hardware usage only for required resources. Because of the features it has, as the business continues Adjusting and modernizing IT strategies to support remote workflows and their businesses, Kubernetes will become the main theme of many corporate audiences in 2021."
Rancher Labs CEO Sheng Liang said: "Just as Linux became the standard computing platform for data centers, clouds and equipment in the 2000s, we fundamentally believe that Kubernetes will quickly become the ubiquitous multi-cloud and heterogeneous IT environment in the 2020s. Enterprise computing platform."
In contrast to Red Hat, another open source company IBM, SUSE is a fairly large open source company, but it does not run its own cloud infrastructure. In terms of shifting to the cloud, especially in the development of hybrid cloud, SUSE has acquired Rancher and has hybrid cloud capabilities that can attract companies that do not want to use only one cloud.
Rancher’s equal commitment to the open source community has been approved by all mainstream certified Kubernetes distributions and operating systems including RKE, K3s, Microsoft Cloud AKS, Amazon EKS, Google Cloud GKE, Alibaba Cloud ACK, Tencent Cloud TKE, and Baidu Smart Cloud CCE. stand by. Because there is no lock-in of suppliers and limitations of computing scenarios, enterprises can carry out infinite innovation from edge to core to cloud within their business scope.
In the future, SUSE and Rancher will jointly develop solutions to solve the complex problems of today's enterprises, focusing on helping enterprises to innovate in the field of edge computing.
02
CNCF accepts K3s, container ecology continues to edge computing
The merger of two open source companies, SUSE and Rancher, will inevitably expand their commercial footprint. So, will the two open source development models that depend on them be affected?
K3s is a lightweight Kubernetes release launched by Rancher in February 2019. It is less than 100MB in size. It is the most optimized version of Kubernetes and can be run anywhere from the cloud to the data center to the edge.
In August 2020, K3s joined the CNCF sandbox project. It is the first Kubernetes release to enter the CNCF sandbox project. It is also currently the world’s largest CNCF certified lightweight Kubernetes release, and it is also the second Rancher to join the CNCF sandbox. Box of items. As early as October 2019, Rancher donated Longhorn, a Kubernetes persistent storage project, to CNCF and became its sandbox project.
CNCF builds a sustainable ecosystem and promotes community development around a series of high-quality projects that orchestrate containers as part of the microservice architecture.
Specifically, K3s passed all conformance tests defined by CNCF and became a certified Kubernetes release. CNCF's software consistency ensures that each vendor's Kubernetes version supports the required API and supports the open source community version. This consistency also guarantees that K3s can replace any other Kubernetes distribution.
k3s is a CNCF conformance certified Kubernetes release designed specifically for the Internet of Things and edge computing. The CNCF's acceptance of Rancher's K3S by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation may become one of the most important milestones in the history of Kubernetes and cloud native computing.
K3S has become the most popular edge computing Kubernetes solution in the open source community. Since its release in March 2019, K3s has been downloaded more than 1 million times worldwide, with an average of more than 20,000 installations per week, and 30% of the downloads are from China. Up to now, the number of K3s GitHub Stars has exceeded 14,900.
At the same time, K3s has also spawned other innovative projects in the open source community. The surrounding ecology includes the lightweight K3s installation tool k3up, the fast-building k3s cluster tool k3d, the industry’s first Kubernetes operating system K3OS, the lightweight local container engine K3c, and the Octopus, a lightweight expansion controller for Kubernetes and K3s, and AutoK3s, an automation tool for K3s.
03
K3s is continuously optimized for edge computing
The open source K3s can stand out among the open source Kubernetes releases, which stems from the strong user base and application prospects of Kubernetes container technology, and at the same time further expands the application of Kubernetes containers to the field of edge computing and AI.
Kubernetes is a system that helps deploy, expand, and manage containerized applications. Google engineers built it to handle the explosive workload of the company's huge digital platform. In 2014, Google open sourced Kubernetes, and Kubernetes became the first CNCF project, which greatly expanded the scope of use.
Currently, Kubernetes now has more than 2,300 contributors, making it the most popular container orchestration platform in the world.
The Kubernetes cluster scheduling function allows developers to build cloud-native applications, focusing more on code rather than operations. Kubernetes' future-oriented application development and infrastructure management can be performed locally or in the cloud, without the need for vendor or cloud provider binding.
According to a survey by 451 Research, by 2022, 76% of global enterprises will implement Kubernetes standardization, making it the most relevant platform for leveraging business strategies and cloud-native applications.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 75% of enterprise-generated data can be created and processed outside of traditional data centers and the cloud.
Forrester's recent statistics also show that two-thirds of the manufacturers' roadmaps that include mobile decision-making already include edge computing.
Kubernetes provides a consistent image format, API standards, and unified security and operating practices for facilities across heterogeneous infrastructures, and it has quickly become a key element of edge computing. By using Kubernetes, companies can run containers at the edge, maximize resource utilization, simplify testing, and because many organizations can use and analyze more data on site, DevOps teams can migrate faster and more efficiently.
Before the release of K3s, most Kubernetes distributions took up a lot of memory, which was too complicated for IoT and edge computing environments. K3s is designed for developers and operators who run Kubernetes in resource-limited environments, and will meet the growing demand for small, easy-to-manage Kubernetes clusters running on x86, ARM64, and ARMv7 processors in edge computing environments.
Rancher focuses on using the open source Kubernetes container orchestration system for container management, which can automatically perform the deployment, expansion, maintenance, scheduling, and operation of multiple application containers. What Rancher does is to provide Kubernetes as a service, thus eliminating the engineering hassles of all internal mechanisms related to managing, protecting, and managing containers in multiple Kubernetes clusters.
The release of K3s provides developers with a "Kubernetes-as-a-Service" solution stack with "Rancher 2.X + K3s" as the core, extending the capabilities of Kubernetes from data centers and clouds to The edge end gives enterprises the freedom to deploy Kubernetes on any infrastructure.
The three reasons for choosing k3s are: to adapt to the edge environment, k3s is designed for unattended, resource-constrained, remote areas or production workloads inside IoT devices.
Simple and safe. k3s is packaged into a single binary file of less than 60MB, thereby reducing the dependencies and steps required to run the installation, operation and automatic update of the production Kubernetes cluster.
Optimized for ARM. Both ARM64 and ARMv7 support binary files and multi-source mirroring. k3s works well in environments as small as Raspberry Pi or as large as AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB servers.
04
Cloud-native edge computing increases AI+IoT innovation
K3s extends the advantages of Kubernetes to the field of edge computing, making edge computing completely cloud-native, intelligent, scalable and secure, thus promoting computing everywhere. In the future, IoT will continue to promote edge innovation, and Kubernetes will play a significant role in this transformation.
First, Kubernetes is suitable for the distribution of AI and IoT workloads.
Kubernetes has become the de facto platform for running workloads in the cloud and data centers. As AI reasoning is moving to the edge, customers are looking for a reliable software platform. With K3s, customers can obtain a unified platform across clouds and edges.
AI and IoT workloads can be managed through standard cloud-native technologies such as Helm charts, container images, CI/CD pipelines, and container registry software supply chains.
Secondly, K3s at the edge and Kubernetes in the cloud form a good combination, thus completing the cycle of software delivery. The AI model is trained in the cloud and deployed as a container on K3s for inference. IoT applications are containerized and run at the edge, feeding data to AI models.
With support for various architectures, K3s powers easy-to-manage multi-node Kubernetes clusters running on x86, AMD64, ARMv7, and 64-bit ARMv8-A processors embedded in IoT devices or Edge.
Once again, SUSE has completed the acquisition of Rancher Labs, and this integration in the open source ecosystem has a considerable impact on end users and communities. Based on previous mergers and acquisitions in the open source industry, people have been worried about the future of K3. In particular, SUSE has its own Linux distribution, and there may be a bundling agreement that restricts K3s to SUSE's own Linux.
The news that K3s joined the CNCF greatly relieved the community. It is now guaranteed that the project will have community contributions and parallel development processes, as well as a mature governance model defined by CNCF.
K3s is the first Kubernetes release submitted to CNCF as the Shahe project. It has huge potential, making it not only the first choice for edge computing, but even the first choice for Kubernetes distribution for running modern applications in enterprise data centers.
In the future, K3s will witness the prosperity of cloud providers and OEMs for edge computing scenarios.
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