VSHN.timer #19: Classic VMs in Kubernetes… and Conferences!

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.
In this exceptional edition with 7 items we are going to talk about managing „classic“ virtual machines with Kubernetes, a subject suggested by VSHNeer João Pinto; then we’ll dive into Helm 3.0 and into a deluge of conferences!
1. Some applications require a bit more than just plain containerization. Sometimes their developers only support them on fully-fledged virtual machines, or they require a higher level of isolation, because of security or performance concerns. So it is great news to see KubeVirt being promoted to a CNCF Sandbox Project!  By the way, Nigel Poulton talks about it as well in the last episode of the „Kubernetes This Month“ podcast, which you should check out every month anyway.
https://kubevirt.io/
2. Mention virtual machines and the name VMware comes up immediately. At the last VMworld in San Francisco, they announced VMware Project Pacific, a project specifically designed to support running VM-based workloads in Kubernetes clusters. This announcement (also covered by Nigel Poulton in September) means more and more IT teams can start integrating Kubernetes and containers into their more „classic“ environments, based on virtual machines.
https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/projectpacific.html
3. More players are jumping into this space lately. Mirantis open sourced their own VM-in-Kubernetes solution, called virtlet. One of the major goals of this project is to make VMs seamlessly integrate into Kubernetes pods, just like any other container, including networking, with a very straightforward integration.
https://github.com/Mirantis/virtlet
4. The distance between containers and virtual machines keep shortening, as Weaveworks has released Firekube, a Kubernetes cluster working on top of Ignite and AWS Firecracker. In a world of FaaS and microservices, expanding the options for running code fast and efficiently is a must.
https://github.com/weaveworks/wks-quickstart-firekube
5. Back to „traditional Kubernetes“ news, our dear container orchestrator continues its inexorable growth, in spite of the concern of some teams. Upcoming features such as „classic“ VM support and sidecar containers will further enhance this dominant position, with ever growing innovation levels all around its ecosystem. Speaking about which, one of the greatest news of last week was the release of Helm 3.0! A major (and much awaited) milestone for the official „package manager“ for Kubernetes. And yes, you read it right: Tiller is gone!
https://github.com/helm/helm/releases/tag/v3.0.0
6. The tool of the week is the kubectl-plugins project by Marko Lukša, engineer at Red Hat and book author. We simply loved the kubectl really get all command, which returns absolutely everything inside a Kubernetes namespace!
https://github.com/luksa/kubectl-plugins
7. And a bonus item this week, because conferences! Tonight starts ServiceMeshCon, tomorrow start KubeCon and CloudNativeCon! (there’s a livestream for the latter you might want to tune in tomorrow evening – CET time of course) and if all that wasn’t enough, there is also MulticloudCon in San Diego tonight! Stay tuned for the deluge of information during the week. We’ll have lots to say about them next Monday for sure!
https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america-2019/livestream/
Are you already running virtual machines in your Kubernetes clusters? Do you think this approach will become the next standard? Are you in the bay area attending ServiceMeshCon, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, or MulticloudCon? Would you like to share your experience with the community? Get in touch with us through the form at the bottom of this page, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.