Microsoft shoves serverless container baby Virtual Kubelet at KubeCon crowds

KubeCon Europe The shadow of Microsoft loomed large over KubeCon with the version 1.0 release of its serverless container tech, Virtual Kubelet.

While banished to the rear-end of keynotes for the first day of the CNCF shindig, Redmond had a few nuggets with which to delight the faithful, including the Service Mesh Interface specification and the Virtual Kubelet milestone.

Virtual Kubelet is an integration of Kubernetes and serverless tech, like Azure Container Instances. Adopted by the CNCF as a sandbox project in December 2018, implementations exist on other serverless cloud container platforms, such as AWS Fargate, OpenStack and (whisper it) the Huawei Cloud Container Instance.

The aim is to extend the Kubernetes API to the edge as well as serverless. Microsoft inflicted the thing on KubeCon back in 2017 and development has chugged along over the intervening years.

Today the Virtual Kubelet team reckon the technology is ready for production workloads and slapped a 1.0 number on it.

The gang told The Register that it had "been working hard to stabilize our core interfaces and provide concrete lifecycles for our providers within VK". Pondering the challenge of housing a diverse set of providers, the team also told us that it had "created a baseline set of criteria to signal whether a provider adheres to our definition of what production ready means".

Housekeeping aside, the team also insisted that it had made "vast improvements" to the performance of Virtual Kubelet, revamping the reconciliation mechanisms of pods and nodes. "This means VK can burst to providers even faster and provide results instantaneously."

Kubernetes co-daddy and now Microsoftie Brendan Burns was his usual excitable self about the tech, celebrating the freeing of users from the tedium of managing operating systems. And he simply had to squeeze in the compulsory Azure plug and remind developers of the general availability of AKS virtual nodes "powered by the open source community code in the Virtual Kubelet project".

Just in case you wanted something cloudy with a hint of Azure on which to host your clusters. ®