It didn’t seem that long ago that at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco where VMware announced Project Pacific. At the time I wrote about how I thought that it was a stroke of Kubernetes genius. After going through all the subsequent pre release and NDA materials and having played a little bit with the Project Pacific BETA, I am standing by that claim and that VMware will deliver on the promise of separating the developer world from the infrastructure world while leveraging Kubernetes as the control plane built directly into vSphere all in the one platform.

As an overview, here is what I feel Project Pacific is all about.

The whole premise of Project Pacific is to use Kubernetes to manage workloads via declarative specifications. Essentially allowing IT Ops and Devs to tell vSphere what they want and have it deploy and manage the infrastructure that ultimately serves as a platform for an application. This is all about the application! Abstracting all infrastructure and most of the platform to make the application work. We are now looking at a platform platform that controls all aspects of that lifecycle end to end.

By redesigning vSphere and implanting Kubernetes into the core of vSphere, VMware are able to take advantage of the things that make Kubernetes popular in todays cloud native world. A Kubernetes Namespace is effectively a tenancy in Kubernetes that will manage applications holistically and it’s at the namespace level where policies are applied. QoS, Security, Availability, Storage, Networking, Access Controls can all be applied top down from the Namespace. This gives IT Ops control, while still allowing devs to be agile.

Welcome to vSphere with Kubernetes:

So Project Pacific is now vSphere with Kubernetes as it is released in vSphere 7. With it, the promise of delivering modern application at cloud scale. VMware Cloud Foundation 4 becomes central to the way in which this is delivered.

 

The Cloud Foundation in place, it allows for the fastest way to bring Kubernetes into organisations by automating the deployment of containerised compute, storage and networking. One of the great things about it is that from an IT Infrastructure guys point of view, you don’t need to have specialised knowledge in containers or Kubernetes.. though obviously it’s important to have some grounding. (see my notes at the end of this post for links). One deployed the Kubernetes infrastructure and management and operations planes are shareable to both developers and infrastructure teams.

 

The idea behind VMware Cloud Foundation is that is unifies Kubernetes and VMs forming a complete stack that operates at the cloud level across private, public and hyperscalers. It also adds efficiency, resiliency and security for VM and container workloads. Needless to say there is a lot of trust and hope being put into this release and VMware aren’t shy of overstating it’s relevance and importance… both to them and their customers. I’m looking forward to seeing the vision become reality when it makes its way into my labs.

There is a lot more being written about this vSphere 7 launch from a lot of VMware vCommunity Bloggers, so hit up the #vSphere7 hashtag to find out more.

When it hits GA in April, I will look to post on vSphere, ESXi, vSAN and what the new features and enhancements means in the service provider world.

Additional Announcement Links: