Container/Kubernetes Technology — Interesting Acquisitions in 2019

Credit: Shutterstock and https://www.channelfutures.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/vmwares-re-acquisition-of-pivotal-helps-create-tanzu-for-kubernetes

Containers/ Kuberenetes — One of the most exciting technology in today’s times. Innovation in this area is happening at wrap speed; thanks to the power of open source communities and companies evolving dedicated products, platforms and services around containers and kubernetes. There had been many mergers and acquisitions happened last year. In this article I am putting up 3 top acquisitions from latest to greatest.

1. Mirantis acquired Docker Enterprise business
2. VMWare acquired Pivotal (and other companies)
3. IBM Acquired Red Hat

What these organizations are doing after mergers and how are they shaping up together. Interesting point to note about these acquisitions is that they have large impact on hybrid cloud & containers/kubernetes adoption as well. Let’s explore these 3 acquisitions in detail.

Mirantis acquired Docker Enterprise business

Mirantis that helps companies run kubernetes and OpenStack had bought Docker Enterprise Container Platform before 2019 wrapped up. With this move Mirantis wants to establish themselves further in container/ kubernetes space. Docker on other hand is very old in containers business and generally its taken as de-facto name for container technology. It is also known for building, sharing and safely running any application anywhere — from public cloud to hybrid cloud to the edge. Docker also has docker swarm that gets used as container orchestration layer in their products.

By getting Docker power added to Mirantis they definitely wants to expand their market share as well as complement their business by using Docker capabilities at core of their solutions. As per Mirantis CEO Alex Freedland their goals would be to establish themselves in these areas:

1. Multi cluster management technology through single pane of glass
2. Zero touch kubernetes framework
3. Robust set of enterprise Kubernetes expertise with having more upstream contribution and features

Well these are very broad statements and first 2 are ambitious. It will be really interesting to see if they succeed in giving zero touch kubernetes framework for hybrid cloud. Further to it we are yet to see any further concrete announcements from Mirantis and Docker.

VMWare acquired Pivotal (and other companies)

August 2019 — Virtualization specialist VMware shook hands with Pivotal’s capabilities to expand kubernetes based offerings more powerfully. These two companies complement each other; on one hand Pivotal comes with whole lot of developer centric capabilities and on other side VMware comes with strong virtualization platforms and products presence. With this acquisition and few more VMware has reinvented themselves to go beyond their traditional offerings around virtualization only. Acquisitions are helping VMware to attract open source community/developers along with achieving broader purpose of executing their bold strategy to revolve around containers, kubernetes, hybrid cloud and cloud-native application development.

A quick glance of acquisitions by VMware in last 3 years:

Picture source VMware website

VMWare is getting much more focused with Pivotal and other companies addition to it’s kitty. They are collaborating well in advance with its partners and competitions:

• Pivotal and VMware co-engineered the enterprise Kubernetes platform Pivotal Container Service (PKS). This move has been done to make their existing VMware vSphere customers to adopt to container technology, together they are calling it developer ready infrastructure.
• VMware Tanzu, a portfolio of products and services created with this name Tanzu to enhance the capabilities of VMware in K8S space. This portfolio leverages their other acquisition capabilities from Heptio, Bitnami and Pivotal as well. With VMware Tanzu they claim to provide capabilities to build modern applications, run kubernetes consistently across environments and manage it all from a single point of control, including a new cross-cloud Kubernetes management console called Tanzu mission control. Tanzu mission control is the control plane offering that helps users manage multiple hybrid kubernetes clusters that can be spread across various hybrid clouds such as AWS, Azure, Google cloud, VMware vSphere. Through Tanzu their mission is to create a complete stack of offerings from Infrastructure to applications.

Picture source VMware website

• VMware also doing various collaborations with their earlier or present competitions in order to create win-win situation. For example: VMware hardware supported by RedHat OpenShift Container platform. Recently VMware and AWS have come together to offer hybrid cloud possibility for their customers on-premises and those who are interested to maintain their apps in both worlds.

Picture source VMware website

With complete leadership backing and focus inside VMware it is expected to have one of the most compelling story of hybrid cloud and kubernetes for the customers.

IBM Acquired Red Hat

IBM Acquired Red Hat — July 2019 — One of the biggest tech news of the year 2019. IBM acquired Red Hat to strengthen their hybrid cloud strategy and to become bigger player in container space. With this acquisition IBM has accelerated their involvement in open source and hybrid cloud businesses across industries and on other hand Red Hat is now able to reach out to more geographies and domains. Interesting thing to note IBM committed to preserve the independence and neutrality of Red Hat’s open source heritage. Therefore both are operating as separate entities and retaining their separate services and products as well as evolving some products and offerings together.

IBM is experienced in handling applications and middleware very well. With this acquisition they are taking their applications business to hybrid environment as well as collaborating well with public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google etc.

From Red Hat’s perspective even before this acquisition they were preparing themselves proactively for hybrid cloud scenarios and partnering with public cloud biggies like AWS, Microsoft, Google, VMware etc. Red Hat in turn had bought CoreOS early last year even before their acquisition by IBM, which definitely helped them strengthening their core container platform.

According to IBM CEO Ginny Rometty with this move they are looking for three growth areas:

1. Red Hat scale and broader go to market

2. IBM’s products and software on Red Hat stack

3. IBM strengthening their services business

So far I have seen this is exactly what is happening and IBM & Red Hat products are getting evolved together as well as independently:

• Red Hat OpenShift Container platform (OCP) is by far one of the most comprehensive kubernetes PaaS product in the market. This product is evolving at vary fast pace and has been kept as independent entity. Since last three releases of Red Hat that is from OCP version 4.0 to 4.3 they have introduced multiple new features. To name a few — Installation and upgrades ease (IPI and UPI methods), developer centric features, Istio service mesh integration, knative serverless feature integration (still in GA as of latest OCP 4.3 release) and many more.

Picture source Red hat content

• IBM Cloud Paks with Red Hat OCP — IBM has optimized their 100 plus products for OpenShift and bundled them into what they named as “Cloud Paks.” There are currently five of these cloud paks: Cloud Pak for Data, Application, Integration, Automation and Multi-cloud Management. These cloud paks which IBM’s customers can now run on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform or IBM’s own cloud etc. with OpenShift containers platform as container orchestration layer. OCP 4.2 is currently supported by these cloud paks as on this writing.

Picture source IBM content

• Mainframes and OpenShift — OpenShift is now supported on IBM mainframe systems that includes the IBM Z and Linux One. Initial question that instantly comes to mind when most of us read about the same…Mainframes and OpenShift/Kubernetes? What are they trying to do? However after understanding a bit deeper it seems relevant for private cloud customers as they can retain their high speed hardware coupled with kubernetes speed for churning applications. It will be really interesting to see some case studies that indicate, how customers getting benefited while IBM is trying to solve this complex puzzle.

IBM and Red Hat both together have experience, execution capacity, customer base and leadership commitment. This move is certainly giving huge push to IBM’s services business and higher chances of leading hybrid cloud space.

* Diagrams used in article are from VMware and IBM/ Red Hat websites.