Google, one of the inventors of container technology Kubernetes, wants to use the service to make it easier to run and manage containers on the platform.
Software containers are a fast-growing technology, but the system is not the easiest to manage. So says Drew Bradstock, product lead for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). “Despite six years of progress, Kubernetes is still very complex,” he writes in the Autopilot announcement, “And what we’ve seen over the past year is that many companies are embracing Kubernetes, but then they run into that complexity.”
The Kubernetes platform, which Google developed but is now open source, is the most popular of the container platforms. In addition, apps are developed in a ‘container’ so that they can be rolled out on different environments and clouds without too many problems. However, it must be taken with a grain of salt ‘without problems.
GKE is already largely a ‘managed service’, but Google is now also introducing Autopilot, a deployment service for GKE that adds another layer of automatic management. One of the differences between the two is, among other things, the management level.
Kubernetes works with nodes (individual servers), clusters (a series of physical or virtual servers), containers (on which the programs run) and pods (a group of one or more containers on a node). Where GKE manages at the cluster level, Autopilot also includes nodes and pods in its management tool.
Google explains the whole concept in its documentation. As the name implies, Autopilot mainly means that there are many settings preconfigured so that the admins themselves have less work. The best practices for running and securing those clusters and nodes are also immediately incorporated.
The intention is that Autopilot will take care of all so-called ‘day 2 operations’, the actual running of the containers. That is about scaling up, upgrades and maintenance, for example. Not much will change for the developers who set up new containers.
