Kubernetes in-market distribution and ecosystems
Kubernetes is supported by a fast-growing and vibrant open source community. There are more than 60 known Kubernetes platforms and distributions on the market. On the high level, there are managed Kubernetes and standard Kubernetes distributions from the upstream community. We’re covering a high-level wrap-up for Kubernetes and its ecosystem in this section.
Upstream vanilla Kubernetes
Upstream vanilla Kubernetes is commonly used when the organization wants to manage the Kubernetes cluster and their own on-premises infrastructure or their cloud-based VM. The source code of Kubernetes distribution comes from the upstream Kubernetes community project. It’s open for contribution, so feel free to join any Special Interest Group (SIG) groups; here’s the full list of community groups : https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/sig-list.md.
If you have any ideas to share or want to learn from the community: https://kubernetes.io/docs/contribute/generate-ref-docs/contribute-upstream/.
Managed Kubernetes
Cloud vendor-managed Kubernetes distribution often falls into this category. Managed Kubernetes distribution is usually based on the vanilla Kubernetes cluster, and different vendors build their features on top of that and make it more adaptive to their infrastructure. A managed Kubernetes distribution usually has a control plane managed by the vendor, and users only need to manage the worker nodes and focus their energy on delivering value based on their core expertise.
Microsoft Azure provides Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Web Service (AWS) has Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is proud of its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
Other popular Kubernetes distributions include VMware’s Tanzu, RedHat OpenShift, Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes, and Kubernetes from Ranger Lab.
Kubernetes ecosystems
The Kubernetes ecosystem is not limited to provisioning and management tools; it has a wide variety of tools for security, networking, observability, and more. It covers all the important aspects of working with Kubernetes. The Kubernetes ecosystem is an important part of the cloud-native landscape. Thanks to Kubernetes being highly portable and platform-agnostic, we can literally take Kubernetes anywhere. It is easy to integrate with a security-sensitive disconnected scenario or integrated with the hybrid scenario as organizations are moving to the cloud. Those tools in the ecosystem are complementary to each other to boost Kubernetes’ tremendous growth as a cloud-native technology and make a positive impact in the community and on the different sizes of businesses. Check out the cloud-native landscape at https://landscape.cncf.io.
Learning about Kubernetes and its ecosystem will help you better understand how to work with Kubernetes for your organization and how to help your organization get the best out of Kubernetes.