Today Scality announces the first stable release of MetalK8s, the open source K8s distribution focused on bare-metal deployments, long-term maintenance and ease of operation. To bolster these efforts, it joined the Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Silver member.
As the number of organizations using multi-cloud environments continues to increase, Kubernetes is becoming a standard way to manage applications. Scality has invested time and resources over the past 18 months to find the best way to deploy and manage its next-generation product line, and Kubernetes emerged as a clear winner.
It’s exciting to deepen our open source strategy by joining the Linux Foundation and be active with CNCF. With our flagship open source project Zenko we’re incessantly building a strong community and with MetalK8s reaching v.1 we’re hoping to get more people excited about all of our cloud projects.
The team was looking for the best solutions to manage Zenko on-premise for large customers. Early versions of Zenko employed Docker Swarm but the limits in that approach became quickly apparent. Looking at other K8s implementations, no option emerged as a clear winner, so the team decided to build a new solution based on other open source projects.
MetalK8s has a strong foundation with the open source installer Kubespray and other tools, like Prometheus and Grafana. However, because the Scality team has parsed the often baffling options, MetalK8s’ deployments only require few key decisions from operators. The result is a simplified deployment path for a new Kubernetes cluster on bare-metal, with easier long-term maintenance.
People will have strong feelings about the choices made to simplify Kubernetes deployments. That’s why we like to call MetalK8s the opinionated Kubernetes distribution.
MetalK8s version 1.0 comes with default dashboards that help operators keep control of the cluster based on the following services:
- Kubernetes dashboard A general purpose, web-based UI for Kubernetes clusters
- Grafana Monitoring dashboards for cluster services
- Cerebro An administration and monitoring console for Elasticsearch clusters
- Kibana A search console for logs indexed in Elasticsearch
Deployments using release 1.0 can be upgraded to later MetalK8s 1.x versions. The upcoming Zenko version 1 is deployed on a Kubernetes cluster by default: the enterprise edition will initially support only MetalK8s clusters. The open source code has no such limitations and can run on existing or managed clusters like GKE, simply using the same Helm packages.
The MetalK8s GitHub project welcomes contributions, code and documentation as well as issues and questions on the forum.
