SmartX releases SKS 1.0, to help I&O teams easily deploy and manage production-ready Kubernetes clusters. SKS preloads commonly-used Kubernetes addons and integrates industry-leading SmartX hyper-converged product components (including virtualization, distributed storage, networking and security, etc.), to build a complete enterprise cloud infrastructure that can support both virtualized and containerized applications.
With Kubernetes deployments rapidly increasing in the enterprise, I&O teams are gradually involved in building and maintaining them. This requires mastering new technology stacks, selecting appropriate components, and managing potential resource silos. To address these challenges, SmartX has released SKS 1.0, a one-stop solution for building production-ready Kubernetes clusters with necessary resources.
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Product Features
Easy-to-Use Kubernetes Cluster Lifecycle Management. Clusters are managed through a graphical interface for quick creation, unified storage management, plugin installation, and monitoring.
Production-Ready Storage and Network Pre-Integration with Cluster High Availability. SKS (with SMTX OS) provides stable, high-performance storage for stateful apps, flat interconnection of VMs/containers, unified security policy management, and automated control plane virtual IP configuration for high availability. It also ensures business continuity during upgrades, scale-out/down, and node replacement.
Flexible Choices for Components and Kubernetes Versions. SKS offers standard Kubernetes with user-selected open-source components, integrating proven CNCF ecosystem components like MetalLB, Contour, Prometheus, and supporting different Kubernetes versions in workload clusters with no vendor lock-in.
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Use Cases
Quickly Create and Manage Kubernetes Clusters Based on VM.  In the HCI cluster with SmartX Native Hypervisor ELF, create a Kubernetes cluster with VMs as nodes and use it as a Kubeconfig file. Automate and standardize full lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters, including rapid cluster scaling, node replacement, and upgrade/rollback.
Support Virtualized and Containerized Apps on Existing Hardware Resources. Manage multiple VMs and Kubernetes clusters in a unified management platform, share and logically isolate resources using HCI virtualization, and reclaim resources promptly to improve resource utilization.
Provide Kubernetes Clusters for Multi-Tenants. Multiple Kubernetes clusters of varying sizes, versions, configurations, and purposes can be created and maintained in the same resource pool, with isolated resources and networks that do not interfere with one another.
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