Spectro Cloud announced a major release of its award-winning management platform, Palette.

Palette simplifies how platform engineering and operations teams manage Kubernetes clusters and additional ecosystem integrations across their full lifecycle - whether deployed in virtualized or bare metal data centers, public clouds, or edge locations. The platform uniquely extends the concept of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF's) Cluster API and allows teams to easily model full Kubernetes stacks from the OS to the application into Palette's curated, reusable Cluster Profiles - all declaratively managed after deployment. Palette offers a complete choice of operating systems, K8s distributions and tools from the broad K8s ecosystem and a unique decentralized architecture with local policy enforcement for virtually infinite scale.

Now, with its 4.0 release, Palette enables these teams to run Virtual Machine workloads alongside containers on the same Kubernetes clusters in the data center.

Virtual Machine Orchestrator brings VMs to bare metal Kubernetes

This announcement comes as more and more organizations are committing to containers and microservices-based development for new applications - but while a majority of existing monolithic applications are still running as VMs.

In this transitional period, operations teams must maintain two heterogeneous infrastructure platforms, while undertaking the complex work of configuring common shared services and policies to support their application modernization and hybrid application initiatives split across containers and VMs.

Kubernetes has rapidly matured and, with its vibrant ecosystem, has emerged as the modern application platform spanning multiple computing environments. For organizations uncertain about their future commitment to the virtualization paradigm, Kubernetes is the obvious platform to move towards for infrastructure simplification and potential cost savings - including costs from virtualization licenses.

As part of the forthcoming 2023 State of Production Kubernetes report, Spectro Cloud surveyed 333 IT professionals that work with Kubernetes in production. 86% of them said they wanted to unify their containerized and VM workloads on a single infrastructure platform. 23% went further, saying that "support for both VM and containerized workloads" is one of their top-three considerations when choosing a solution to manage their Kubernetes infrastructure.

But until now there has been no enterprise-grade way to make this consolidation happen.

Today, Palette 4.0 introduces Virtual Machine Orchestrator (VMO). It equips enterprises to run VMs as first-class citizens directly on bare metal Kubernetes, side by side with containers, on the same clusters. To achieve this, VMO extends the CNCF open-source project KubeVirt, fully integrated with Palette's always-on, full-stack orchestration and centrally-managed full lifecycle management capabilities. With Palette's VMO, VM workloads can be deployed across multi-cluster data center environments, and managed at scale consistently and efficiently from the Palette UI, CLI or via its API, with the same policies, workflows and topologies used to govern containerized applications.

"Many of our customers that are already in their application modernization journey are exploring the benefits of migrating existing VM-based workloads to a unified infrastructure platform with Kubernetes at its core," said Jim Melton, Head of Cloud Strategy & Programs, Digital Velocity, CDW. "We share a common vision with Spectro Cloud in helping our customers simplify and optimize their infrastructure, wherever they are in their cloud native journey."

"While Kubernetes is the de facto infrastructure block for new application development, organizations are still challenged to operate and maintain multiple heterogeneous infrastructure platforms in the data center to support both virtual machines and containers", said Spectro Cloud co-founder and CEO Tenry Fu. "With this new major release of Palette, we are helping organizations easily unify operations for both types of workloads, significantly simplifying their enterprise infrastructure and optimizing for cost."

The most powerful way to bring VMs to Kubernetes

Unlike competitive solutions that promise similar functionality but rely on manual configurations, Palette's VMO:

• Automates and simplifies the end-to-end Kubernetes deployment, both for the initial bare metal K8s deployment and Day 2 operations, enabling management of the host OS directly via Palette.
• Offers choice and openness with more than 50+ out-of-the-box integrations and the ability for customers to bring their own packs to use with their VMs.
• Eliminates the need for additional configurations to enable VM management across clusters. VMO comes pre-configured as part of Palette's Cluster Profiles.
• Leverages Palette's always-on management and declarative orchestration to ensure the state of the VMs and the underlying bare metal Kubernetes cluster remain as designed, improving system and application resilience.
• Provides key features for VM management such as VM live migration, dynamic resource rebalancing and maintenance mode that meets enterprise production VM requirements.

Palette's VMO gives IT leaders a non-disruptive migration path for their VM workloads and enables new hybrid application models. And for organizations currently paying for hypervisor licenses, moving VMs to bare metal Kubernetes infrastructure presents an opportunity for significant cost savings.

"Moving to Kubernetes on bare metal is key to enterprise infrastructure modernization and unlocking significant reductions in cost, but only if enterprises can bring their workloads with them," said Alex Jones, Director of Kubernetes Engineering, Canonical. "By leveraging the power of the open source community, Spectro Cloud has created a powerful new capability in VMO that puts enterprises back in the driving seat and in control of their infrastructure destiny."

Extended edge support, easier access to community innovation

Beyond Palette's Virtual Machine Orchestrator (VMO), Palette 4.0 brings a host of other new features.

Nvidia Arm support for edge:

Palette 4.0 now has native support for ARM64 architectures with the addition of the Nvidia Orin module for edge computing.

It further establishes Palette Edge as the most mature platform for edge Kubernetes, following recent announcements such as the industry's first flexible immutable edge stack and the Secure Edge-Native Architecture (SENA), supported by Intel, earlier this year.

Community pack repositories:

One of the great strengths of Kubernetes is its vibrant ecosystem that builds on its platform. It gives Kubernetes users an endless choice of components to integrate into their clusters, from monitoring to service mesh and security.

Palette has always enabled organizations to harness this community innovation by providing direct support for more than 50 different integrations and packs directly from Spectro Cloud's repositories, offered as prebuilt ‘packs' ready to deploy to clusters from within the Palette UI.

Now Palette 4.0 brings a new type of community repository for customers to access and share their own curated packs and integrations, for convenient access to even greater choice.

The safe choice for enterprise Kubernetes in production at scale

These new enhancements in Palette 4.0, along with today's release of Palette VerteX for government and regulated industries, show Spectro Cloud's continuing commitment to the needs of those using Kubernetes as their engine for innovation, in production, at scale - wherever it takes them.

Palette's outstanding performance and flexibility has already made it the choice of innovators at the edge, like GE HealthCare and award-winning agritech startup Tevel.

It's the power behind one of the world's largest bare-metal Kubernetes deployments for Super League Gaming, and is serving thousands of developers running mission-critical applications at T-Mobile, backed by our award-winning customer support team and platform SLAs.