Scality Invests in Kubernetes and Unveils MetalK8s Open Source Distribution

Scality, Inc. announced its membership in Cloud Native Computing and Linux Foundations, at the same time, announcing its MetalK8s open source Kubernetes distribution focused on bare-metal deployments, long-term maintenance and ease of operation.

As the number of organisations using multi-cloud environments continues to increase, Kubernetes is becoming a standard way to manage applications. The company has invested time and resources over the past 18 months to find the best way to deploy and manage its next-generation product line, and Kubernetes emerged as a winner.

“We’re excited to deepen our open source strategy by joining the Linux Foundation and to be active with CNCF. With our flagship open source project, Zenko, we have been building a very strong community. As MetalK8s reaches version one, we think that even more people are going to get excited about our cloud projects,” said Giorgio Regni, CTO, Scality.

MetalK8s grew out of the firm’s Zenko development team’s search for the best solutions to manage Zenko on-premises for large customers. Early versions of Zenko employed Docker Swarm, but the limitations of that approach became quickly apparent. Looking at other K8s implementations, no option emerged as a clear winner, so the team decided to build a new solution, harnessing the strengths of other open source projects.

MetalK8s has a foundation with the open source installer, Kubespray, and other tools, like Prometheus and Grafana. However, because the company’s team has parsed the often baffling options, MetalK8s’ deployments only require few key decisions from operators. The result is a simplified deployment path for a new Kubernetes cluster on bare-metal, with easier long-term maintenance.

“We expect people to have strong feelings about the choices we’ve made to simplify Kubernetes deployments. That’s why we like to call MetalK8s the opinionated Kubernetes distribution,” says Nicolas Trangez, lead architect, MetalK8s.

MetalK8s version 1.0 comes with default dashboards
that help operators control cluster based on following services:

• Kubernetes dashboard, a general purpose, web-based UI for Kubernetes clusters

• Grafana tool for monitoring dashboards for cluster services

• Cerebro, an administration and monitoring console for Elasticsearch clusters

• Kibana, a search console for logs indexed in Elasticsearch

Deployments using MetalK8s version 1.0 can be upgraded to later 1.xx versions.

The MetalK8s GitHub project welcomes contributions, code and documentation as well as issues and questions on the forum.