The Journey of Kubernetes (K8’s) on VMware

I have been building a lot of projects for customers, and for internal consumption recently. Having access to a lab is great. It allows you to try things out and break them in the hopes that you learn something new or you prove a theory or something along those lines. Sometimes we are fortunate to have a huge lab and endless options. But more often than not we have to share some equipment with other people or our team, maybe it's recycled gear, or out of warranty free demo whatever the case.

Usually, you are constrained by something like compute, memory, network or a license. Yet we almost always seem to have a Vsphere cluster running with a handful of hosts to be able to spin up and test things.

What's been interesting having relocated to Australia and meeting customers on a somewhat regular basis (at least pre COVID19) was getting to hear how they solved their problems and what type of infrastructure they ran it on.

Being in the ‘New Stack” space which typically encompasses things like Kubernetes (k8s), Dev Ops. I had come to expect that most people did this at scale on bare metal with lots of small nodes with fairly large node counts. The mindset of coming from Facebook I guess.

What I have found here in APJ is that while that may be true for some customers, it's certainly not the norm. More than half of the customers I speak to run their infrastructure on a virtualized platform- of them I’d say 90%-on VMware, and maybe 10% on KVM, Openstack, other.