VMware has joined the Kubernetes party with Tuesday's unveiling of its VMware Kubernetes Engine.
VMware added its Kubernetes as a service offering to its VMware Cloud Services portfolio. VMware's Kubernetes Engine will start out as a public beta program running on Amazon Web Services with support for Microsoft Azure and other cloud environments coming later, according to a blog post by VMware's Bill Shelton, vice president of product management, and Krishna Ganugapati, vice president, cloud native research and development. VMware is seeking to distance itself from Kubernetes competitors by, eventually, offering its Kubernetes Engine across multiple clouds.
Kubernetes, which is an open source container project that was created by Google, has been a hot topic this year. Kubernetes lets users manage clusters of containers while also making it easier to move applications between public hosted clouds.
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By putting Kubernetes into the cloud, VMware is seeking to reduce the complexities for businesses that want to use Kubernetes containers by offering a managed service for them.
"Kubernetes is an incredibly rich application runtime environment with continuing growth potential but with an associated complexity challenge," Shelton and Ganugapati wrote in Tuesday's blog. "Some customers we talked to have the scale or strategic need to build a dedicated Kubernetes team to assure the full value of the platform is available to their applications."
VMware's Kubernetes engine is facing stiff competition from Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, among others. Earlier this month, Rackspace announced it had partnered with HPE to develop a new Kubernetes-based cloud offering.