Pivotal, Google Cloud Take Aim At Azure With Launch Of Kubo For Deployment, Management Of Kubernetes Clusters

Pivotal and Google Cloud have launched a new open source project called Kubo that is designed to deploy and manage Kubernetes container clusters on any cloud.

The deal gives Google more firepower to take on Microsoft Azure in the enterprise cloud market, said Jamie Shepard, senior vice president for health care and strategy at Lumenate, which does business with Dell EMC, as well as Google and other large cloud providers.

"This will catapult them over [Microsoft] Azure for sure," he said. "The Pivotal ecosystem is difficult to sell into, to have Google support opens up more possibility for the channel, a lot more."

Related: Partners Pleased To Finally See Kubernetes Available Natively On Microsoft Azure

The move is a clear push for Dell EMC into DevOps, and a signal that Google intends to deepen its focus on analytics and the DevOps movement, said Shepard.

"This is a real opportunity for partners to now use Pivotal Cloud Foundry integrated with Google to compete in the whole native cloud app space," Shepard said. "Michael [Dell] paid a lot for EMC, a hardware company, but it's the analytics and what's going on in IoT that he's going for here. He's smart like a fox."

Kubo can be run in on-prem data centers or the cloud. It automates lifecycle management for container orchestrator Kubernetes, allowing operators to use familiar open source management tool BOSH to manage the infrastructure that underpins containers running Kubernetes, said Pivotal.

Shepard said both Dell EMC and Google are banking on the proliferation of micro data centers designed to support IoT devices that get data in real time. Kubo allows customers to use Pivotal as a platform for DevOps and analytics while Google provides the platform to support Pivotal, Shepard said.

"The micro data centers, the analytics, IoT, Dell's going to power it, and Google will be the back end for all of it," Shepard said.

Richard Seroter, senior director of product for Pivotal, said in a blog post that when customers "told us about their challenges getting Kubernetes stood up and operated consistently (example), we sensed an opportunity to help. That's where Kubo comes in. "

"While Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the preferred platform for cloud-native apps, our customers wanted the freedom to take on more responsibility for the software stack, when needed," said Seroter in the blog post. "Pivotal Cloud Foundry now delivers unified lifecycle management (thanks to BOSH!) for whichever cloud runtime abstraction our customers choose."