Live data from Hacker News

GKE On-Prem Alpha

cloud.google.com

71–80 of 89 posts

Re: GKE On-Prem Alpha

#71
post #15

Does it need some special hardware to run on?

Not sure what you mean by "special hardware" but if your hardware is capable of running vSphere, GKE On-Prem should work for you. Quick note though - We are exploring additional options, such as bare metal support, based on customer demand.

So this is like Azure Stack with no limitation on hardware configurations?

Re: GKE On-Prem Alpha

#72
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. As described, it sounds a bit like magic. Of course, it's not. Thus, one wonders about what happens in the lower layers of the stack, namely who gets to run them (GKE or the HW owners): * DNS (not the Kubernetes in-cluster one like kube-dns) * DHCP * LDAP or equivalent * SSH and its keys * on-prem security of the cloud identities (does it require TPM? SGX?) * bootloaders * base OS image * drivers for attache…

Not to mention probably the hardest bit, which is how does it do persistent storage? Running k8s on the various cloud providers tends to use storage engines for those providers (ebs, etc)... Does it ship with ceph out of the box? Some in-house block store? What happens when it breaks? Persistent volumes are IMO the very hardest thing to get right, and for me it's the big reason why I'd rather put my trust in a hosted…

Jesse here. I'm the eng manager for GKE and GKE On-Prem Storage lifecycle over at Google. For basic persistent volumes, we have working vSphere (block) support, which allows us to do a lot (including persistent/stateful services).

We also have great storage abstraction layers built into K8S - CSI, FlexVolumes, and a large suite of in-tree plugins - so adding additional ones is pretty easy.

I think you're talking about something else however - specifically scaled/distributed storage services.

We're investigating options here, though keep in mind you should have no problems running containerized storage services in GKE On-prem. They would be on top of the existing block support I mentioned above. I saw a couple comments in other threads from some vendors that sell solutions that do just that.

For storage systems that don't containerize, that is a different discussion. Happy to talk more.

Re: GKE On-Prem Alpha

#74
post #17
post #2

Hey GKE team, can you give any details about how this works? What does it assume/require from the underlying infrastructure?

We're going to give a breakout session that goes into more depth on Wednesday @ 4:35pm. IO244. Some quick details: It's a bit of a split between what GKE runs and what the customer runs. Alpha runs on vSphere 6.5 and we're packing up a Google-hardened OS in much the same way we package GKE for GCP. A lot of the integrations for things like networking and storage will be coming from partners. We'll also have remote mg…

Will this be something like COS or even CoreOS? Also, I'm curious to hear more about this part:

> GKE On-Prem has a fully integrated stack of hardened components, including OS, container runtime, Kubernetes, and the cloud to which it connects.

Which runtime are you shipping? CRI-O? What type of outgoing cloud connection is that? I have so many questions. I'm actually at the conference this week if you're willing to grab coffee.

Re: GKE On-Prem Alpha

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch. Way to bury the lede! Is this ever going to be a bare-metal thing? Like probably many others, I'm not really interested in doing on-prem virtualization... kubernetes is interesting to me because containers are a better abstraction than virtual machines in the first place. Why add a virtualization layer if you don't have to? (I get that it makes your life easier as the developer of this product, but having to ru…

I feel like I have to say this, even if people get it already. Walk before you run. Bare metal is a LOT harder to manage because, well, hardware fails. We hear the demand, for sure, but vSphere represents walking (and has a lot of customers, too :)

Sure, I get why the decision was made.

But, I don't buy the hardware failure argument, because the same is true of running a vsphere installation in the first place.

vsphere migrates VMs to other machines when the hardware fails, but, analogously, the kube scheduler moves pods to other machines when they fail as well. You have to worry about disk failures in both cases. You have to worry about keeping your vsphere's database up and in a high-availability mode (postgres in my experience), just as you have to worry about keeping k8s's etcd cluster up and in a high-availability mode.

For any problem k8s has on bare metal due to hardware unreliability, vsphere has an analogous problem, it's just pushed down one layer.

IMO the real reason why this is a pragmatic decision is because, people already have lots of experience in running vsphere and understand where the risks and challenges are, and vsphere has lots of tools for things like automating the installation of the hypervisor OS, base level network setup, expectations around NFS for VM storage, etc.

Vsphere represents a decent, known set of tools for getting an infrastructure up and running on bare metal, which is a prerequisite for getting kubernetes running, but what would be exciting to me would be a rethinking of those infrastructure components in a purely open source and industry standard fashion, in a no-frills way that only exists to get a basic k8s control plane up.

Re: GKE On-Prem Alpha

#76
Great to see GKE coming to enterprise datacenters! IBM has been very successful with IBM Cloud Private (https://github.com/IBM/deploy-ibm-cloud-private) bringing an enterprise Kube distribution for VMWare/OpenStack/Bare Metal in enterprise datacenters since last year. I love to see the momentum of another Kubernetes distribution helping create the de-facto next generation of apps for all kinds of use cases.

Re: GKE On-Prem Alpha

#77

So the war for enterprise on-prem Kubernetes just intensified :) RedHat vs Google? :] I wonder how is Rancher doing? I guess life will be harder too? Timing seems to be important, just before OpenShift finishes absorbing Tectonic (or maybe Tectonic is absorbing OpenShift) with their installer, UI and billing services. I guess there's still time for Google to land some big deals :)

The roadmap for Tectonic and CoreOS integration into OpenShift can be found in these videos:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AelNjx6BB4 (OpenShift) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJOm4JbF4eQ (Red Hat CoreOS)

OpenShift is the most mature Enterprise Kubernetes that can be deployed and managed in any cloud environment (public or private). It's great to see further validation that customers want to run applications in both existing data center environments and public cloud environments.

Re: GKE On-Prem Alpha

#78
post #33

would there still be chance for startups doing similar thing ?

there are literally 60+ startup distributions that try to sell a "distribution as a service" for the upstream code that is free.

I think most if not all of them will fail, and as usual, the big 3 or 4 will win the market (if I had to bet: Google, Red hat, Canonical and maybe the guys at Heptio that are really cool and got the right attitude)

Re: GKE On-Prem Alpha

#79
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're going to give a breakout session that goes into more depth on Wednesday @ 4:35pm. IO244. Some quick details: It's a bit of a split between what GKE runs and what the customer runs. Alpha runs on vSphere 6.5 and we're packing up a Google-hardened OS in much the same way we package GKE for GCP. A lot of the integrations for things like networking and storage will be coming from partners. We'll also have remote mg…

Will this be something like COS or even CoreOS? Also, I'm curious to hear more about this part: > GKE On-Prem has a fully integrated stack of hardened components, including OS, container runtime, Kubernetes, and the cloud to which it connects. Which runtime are you shipping? CRI-O? What type of outgoing cloud connection is that? I have so many questions. I'm actually at the conference this week if you're willing to g…

Happy to chat more. DM @westonhutchins and we can setup a time.

Re: GKE On-Prem Alpha

#80
post #10

Hey Weston here from the GKE On-Prem team. Wifi is spotty at the conference but I'll try to answer questions as they come in.

Hi Weston, I'm exploring and using Istio in the recent months, so what is the advantage of the "Managed Istio(with commercial level support)" over the community version? As I know the community is still actively optimizing the performance, will the Managed Istio have a better performance?
Post reply on HN