IBM, Goo gle, Microsoft, and 33 more partner to ensure Kubernetes workload portability
0IBM, Google, Microsoft, and 33 more partner to ensure Kubernetes workload portability.
The Kubernetes ecosystem is taking a big step today aimed at fulfilling the promise of fully portable application workloads. Thirty-six technology companies have announced their participation in Kubernetes Conformance, a certification program that’s aimed at ensuring different pieces of software provide a consistent experience when using the open source container orchestration software.
One of the key promises of Kubernetes, which is software that helps companies manage containerized applications, is the ability to move workloads between different environments like cloud platforms. In theory, Kubernetes workloads should be able to run on any container orchestration platform built on top of the open source project. In practice, it’s possible for companies to create forks of Kubernetes that are incompatible with one another.
All of the participants in the Conformance program, which include Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Red Hat, SAP, and Tencent, have products certified to guarantee that the stock Kubernetes API (which lets developers programmatically set up orchestration tasks) will run consistently. That means it will be easier for developers to move workloads between different platforms and avoid lock-in, something companies look for in a cloud ecosystem.