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InfoQ Homepage News Scaleway Launches Kubernetes Kapsule

Scaleway Launches Kubernetes Kapsule

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Bare-metal cloud solutions provider, Scaleway, has released Kubernetes Kapsule, its containerised application orchestration solution based on the Kubernetes platform and certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The Kubernetes Kapsule service is designed to give IT organisations inside and out of France access to a bare-metal instance of Kubernetes in order to meet compliance mandates that require IT assets to be located in certain locations, such as within the European Union. Based on a distribution of Kubernetes certified by the CNCF, the Kubernetes Kapsule service provides IT teams with an alternative to cloud service providers that make Kubernetes available as an extension of a service based on virtual machines.

Being fully managed, Kubernetes Kapsule offers a range of instances from development-sized instances up to very high-end Render-S GPU instances, making it possible to start with a small number of nodes in a cluster or to deploy clusters of up to five hundred nodes for artificial intelligence projects (e.g. distributed machine learning). It is designed for high availability and has a 99.95% control plane service level agreement (SLA). Kaspule's Control Plane is duplicated for each cluster with the intention that a replacement control plane remains available at any time for platform continuity.

Kapsule Kubernetes offers node auto-scaling and uses related logic to optimise other processes, such as an auto-healing feature, where a cluster automatically recovers and returns to its initial state. Cluster access renewal operations such as access invalidation are simplified. Other available options include NGINX and Traefik as Ingress controller, as well as four different Container Network Interfaces (CNIs).

Kapsule also has access to the public cloud ecosystem, "Scaleway Elements". Kapsule is extendible to "Block Storage" and "Load Balancer", as well as to "Container Registry", which is designed to facilitate the storage, management, and deployment of container images. Kubernetes Kapsule makes an effort to avoid vendor lock-in by enabling integration of hybrid and multi-cloud applications and infrastructures, as recommended by the CNCF standards.

Using block storage volumes allows data to be persisted in the cluster, enabling stateful applications. With data persistence, nodes in a cluster can be deleted, replaced, or restarted if the applications that use them require it. However, it is generally not recommended to implement persistence on Kubernetes nodes because they are considered stateless.

The load balancer makes it possible to redirect traffic between different nodes. Several load balancer references are available depending on the traffic to be distributed. Finally, to deploy images to containers, the Scaleway container registry or another container registry of choice can be used.

Control Plane is the control centre of the cluster, which requires redundancy to ensure high availability of the service. The Control Plane includes Kubernetes master components, "Cloud Controller Manager", "Auto-scaler" and "Container Storage Interface (CSI)" driver. For clusters to be initiated, nodes must be deployed onto appropriate instances. Scaleway's Development Instances (from the DEV1-M range), General Purpose Instances, and GPU Instances (NVIDIA Tesla) are compatible with Kubernetes Kapsule to receive the nodes. Nodes that have the same configurations can be grouped into 'pools'. When creating a node, the essential Kubernetes components are installed (the kubelet, CoreDNS, kube-proxy, and CNI implementation). Application workflows can be configured to fit the intended project.

The Control Plane for Kubernetes Kapsule is made available free of charge. To find out more, read this technical documentation.

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