Choosing a Kubernetes distribution

Pivotal Container Service (PKS) is an enterprise Kubernetes platform, that is designed for rapid results, scaling, and reliability on any infrastructure. PKS provides the simplest way for administrators who are already familiar with VMware technologies such as ESXi and vSphere to deploy a reliable, secure Kubernetes environment. Enterprise PKS uses the latest stable open-source distribution of Kubernetes and supports automatic patching, deployment, and scaling with no downtime.

PKS is designed to work with vSphere for on-premises deployments. Kubernetes worker nodes are deployed, managed, and scaled as virtual machines. PKS supports deploying single, large, distributed Kubernetes clusters and many small clusters. VMware NSX provides load balancing and other networking services such as micro segmentation. Users can choose to deploy PKS on a VMware VSAN-enabled cluster or use an external storage platform such as Isilon to provide blob storage to Domino Data Science Platform.

The following figure shows the PKS architecture:

Figure 11.       Pivotal Container Service

GPU-enabled resources can be made available to PKS Kubernetes clusters through VMware’s Bitfusion software. Bitfusion software enables dynamic GPU allocation over RDMA-enabled networks. A breakout session at VMworld 2019 presented the technology behind Bitfusion and demonstrated how to connect GPU and FPGA resources over network fabric. For more information, see this VMware vSphere Blog. We will update this white paper when support for these technologies are available in PKS Enterprise.

For more information, about the Pivotal Ready Architecture from Dell EMC, see the Pivotal Ready Architecture Datasheet.

During the evaluation of Domino Data Science Platform, we compared using the application on both open-source and PKS distributions of Kubernetes. The following table describes our experience with these two distributions:

Table 8.           Open-source Kubernetes and PKS Enterprise comparison