Equinix to enable hybrid kubernetes architecture with Google cloud

Wed, 19th Apr 2017

FYI, this story is more than a year old

Containers are hot.

According to IDC, the number of container instances in enterprises is expected to approach 1 million by 2020 (DevOps: A Disruption and Opportunity Assessment, Doc #DR2017_T1_AG, February 2017).

We use containers in our DevOps at Equinix and increasingly we see our customers leveraging them within Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers as more enterprises migrate applications to the cloud and deploy hybrid IT environments.

Kubernetes (originally developed by Google) is one of the most popular emerging open source technologies for managing and orchestrating containerized applications, and is the basis for numerous container platforms such as Google Container Engine (GKE).

So, it was a natural fit for Equinix to partner with Google to provide a validated hybrid container orchestration reference architecture, leveraging Kubernetes between Platform Equinix and GKE, to gain direct and secure access to the Google CloudPlatform (GCP) and other Google services (e.g., G Suite, YouTube, Search, G+) via the Equinix Cloud Exchange.

The Equinix and GCP solution documents the components required for a hybrid Kubernetes deployment leveraging GCE within Equinix IBX data centers.

This approach will enable enterprise application developers to more easily containerize applications for cloud migration on Platform Equinix.

"The growing acceptance of Kubernetes and the speed, agility and flexibility of containers are providing the catalyst needed to accelerate enterprise hybrid and multi-cloud adoption," says Al Gillen, Group Vice President, Software Development and Open source, IDC.

Containers enable the direct access to the services needed to build sophisticated hybrid and multi-cloud solutions. Maintaining an enterprise private cloud at Equinix, and using Kubernetes to move containers between their private cloud and Google Cloud Platform, can provide secure and predictable application migration performance for cloud-native applications.

This enables enterprises to leverage hybrid and multi-clouds for constructing disaster recovery and test development environments, and cloud bursting solutions.

By automating deployment, scaling and operations of cloud-native applications across clusters of hosts, containers enable the ability to spin up containers in seconds, versus minutes, and supports up to 100 times the scalability of traditional virtual machine environments.

Google Container Engine is a cluster manager and orchestration system for running containerized applications. It enables application portability so that applications can be deployed, managed and scaled in any environment including on-premises private, hybrid or public cloud.

Enhanced capabilities from leveraging Google Container Engine include:

Setting up a managed container cluster consisting of underlying virtual machines in minutes, making application management easier
Scaling up and down your application automatically based on your resource utilization (CPU, memory)

Google Container Engine is also fully managed by Google site reliability engineers (SRE), ensuring your cluster is available and up-to-date, including both auto-upgrading and auto-repairing your master and nodes.

Connecting Google Cloud Platform with Equinix

Enterprises that connect directly to Google Cloud Platform through the Equinix Cloud Exchange can achieve low-latency network compute performance, improve the ability to move large volumes of data in and out of Google for analysis or storage, and easily manage the network availability and flexibility that comes with dedicated connectivity.

Deployed on Platform Equinix, the Cloud Exchange interconnects enterprises, networks and cloud service providers via direct and secure, high-speed virtualized connections. It enables the simultaneous orchestration of hybrid and multi-cloud solutions across multiple locations on a global scale.

Leveraging the Equinix Cloud Exchange to create private connections between Google Cloud Platform in Equinix data centers enables the following capabilities:

Achieving higher overall performance via network connectivity in multiple regions worldwide, close to applications and service providers that provide higher throughput, lower-latency and more predictable bandwidth
Supporting redundant connections (up to 10 gigabytes) to Google Cloud Platform with full bursting capabilities
Providing world-class management of the IP connectivity from the enterprise network into the Google network, easing the integration of Google Cloud into the enterprise

Google Cloud Platform with Equinix

"Deploying applications using open Kubernetes-based container platforms such as Google Container Engine enables customers to deploy applications more seamlessly in multi-cloud environment, accelerating the creation of hybrid enabled cloud architectures," says Allan Naim, Product Manager on the Google Container Engine team.

"Google enterprise customers can now gain significant value from their cloud services by leveraging the Google Container Engine and direct access to Google Cloud Platform with Equinix.

Article by Garry Young, Equinix blog network

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