Does Kubernetes support VM / node provisioning & management?

Question

To my understanding Kubernetes is a container orchestration service comparable to AWS ECS or Docker Swarm. Yet there are several high rated questions on stackoverflow that compare it to CloudFoundry which is a plattform orchestration service.

This means that CloudFoundry can take care of the VM layer, updating and provisioning VMs while moving containers avoiding downtime. Therefore the comparison to Kubernetes makes limited sense to my understanding.

Am I misunderstanding something, does Kubernetes support provisioning and managing the VM layer too?

No it does not. It's strictly a container orchestration platform. Its API/Scheduler/ControlManager is not responsible for provisioning and managing VMs. — , Oct 19 '18 at 23:04

Rico · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-20T13:45:14.090

4

Yes, you can manage VMs with KuberVirt as @AbdennourTOUMI pointed out. However, Kubernetes focuses on container orchestration and it also interacts with cloud providers to provision things like Load Balancers that can direct traffic to a cluster.

Cloud Foundry is a PaaS that provides much more than Kubernetes at the lower level. Kubernetes can run on top of an IaaS like AWS together with something like OpenShift

This is a diagram showing some of the differences:

edited Oct 20 '18 at 13:45

answered Oct 19 '18 at 23:04

Rico

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Hello @Rico, I disagree BTW. Check my answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52903421/747579 – Abdennour TOUMI Oct 20 '18 at 07:30
@AbdennourTOUMI you are right! I forgot about KubeVirt, thanks for pointing it out. I changed my answer a bit. – Rico Oct 20 '18 at 13:45
Great change! I liked the way that you followed to integrate both info: focusing containers orchestration+highlighting VM – Abdennour TOUMI Oct 20 '18 at 16:40

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 20 '18 at 07:30

As for VM, my answer is YES; you can run VM as workload in k8s cluster.

Indeed, Redhat team figured out how to run VM in the kubernetes cluster by adding the patch KubeVirt.

example from the link above.

apiVersion: kubevirt.io/v1alpha2
kind: VirtualMachine
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: null
  labels:
    kubevirt.io/vm: vm-cirros
  name: vm-cirros
spec:
  running: false
  template:
    metadata:
      creationTimestamp: null
      labels:
        kubevirt.io/vm: vm-cirros
    spec:
      domain:
        devices:
          disks:
          - disk:
              bus: virtio
            name: registrydisk
            volumeName: registryvolume
          - disk:
              bus: virtio
            name: cloudinitdisk
            volumeName: cloudinitvolume
        machine:
          type: ""
        resources:
          requests:
            memory: 64M
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 0
      volumes:
      - name: registryvolume
        registryDisk:
          image: kubevirt/cirros-registry-disk-demo:latest
      - cloudInitNoCloud:
          userDataBase64: IyEvYmluL3NoCgplY2hvICdwcmludGVkIGZyb20gY2xvdWQtaW5pdCB1c2VyZGF0YScK
        name: cloudinitvolume

Then:

kubectl create -f vm.yaml
virtualmachine "vm-cirros" created

Does Kubernetes support VM / node provisioning & management?

2 Answers2