Charmed Kubernetes features
Architectural freedom. Fully automated operations. Extensible Kubernetes for all.
Kubernetes on Ubuntu gives you perfect portability of workloads across all infrastructures, from the datacentre to the public cloud. With a strong focus on AI/ML and providing a cloud-native platform for the enterprise, Ubuntu is the platform of choice for K8s.
Deep integration with infrastructure features such as LBaaS, storage, and networking means freedom and preservation of choice in infrastructure.
Pure upstream
Charmed Kubernetes is a well integrated, turn-key, conformant Kubernetes platform,optimised for your multi-cloud environments.
Get started now and take advantage of our rapidly growing automation tooling ecosystem that is consistent across all infrastructures. Charmed Kubernetes provides users with a standardised workflow to develop, test and promote their cloud native apps up to production environments.
AI / ML and HPC Architecture
GPU acceleration of AI and machine learning workloads on Kubernetes requires careful configuration of the underlying hardware and host OS. Ubuntu is the leading platform for public cloud GPU instances and Canonical offers private cloud expertise to match.
Build a GPU cluster and operate Kubernetes on top for HPC and high-throughput AI / ML data science.
Automated Kubernetes updates
Developers demand the latest features as Kubernetes evolves rapidly in the open source community. On Bare-Metal, VMs or as a service - Charmed Kubernetes will keep your cluster up to date
Using snaps, point releases of Kubernetes are automatically installed. And whenever there is a new major version, Juju charms make upgrading easy.
Managed Kubernetes
Predictable OpEx for organisations looking to adopt production-ready Kubernetes. Focus on your business while we take care of your Kubernetes cluster.
Canonical provides managed services for Kubernetes on-premises or on public clouds.
Charmed Kubernetes fits perfectly on top of OpenStack, VMware, and bare metal
There's no doubt that Kubernetes is the new standard operational layer for every multi-cloud business. Canonical enables K8s on demand for your DevOps teams — on OpenStack, VMware, public clouds, and bare metal clusters with MAAS.
With Charmed Kubernetes, you can deliver 'Containers as a Service' across the enterprise, to enable each project to spin up a standardised K8s environment of arbitrary scale, on demand, with centralised operational control.
- Multi-cloud workload portability thanks to Ubuntu
- Deep integration with virtual substrate features such as LBaaS, storage and networking across OpenStack, VMware, AWS, GCP and Azure
- Same Ubuntu OS and kernel as Google, Azure, AWS Kubernetes offerings
- Support for Charmed Kubernetes as well as K8s deployed using kubeadm
- Support for CNCF Kubernetes binaries
- PCI device passthrough for GPU, FPGA and SR-IOV workloads
- AI and machine learning optimisations in partnership with Nvidia and Google
- Flavours to match public cloud K8s on Google, Azure, and AWS
- Standard upstream Kubernetes, CNCF builds available
- Portfolio of third-party certified solutions for CI/CD
- Abstracting complexity of Day-0 to Day-2 operations by encapsulating them in Juju charms
- Upgrades guaranteed between K8s releases
- Security updates by Canonical just like Ubuntu
- Full OCI compatibility with
dockerandcontainerdruntimes - Prometheus and ELK logging and monitoring included
- Extensible, third-party ecosystem for storage and networking
In partnership with Google, Canonical delivers the perfect K8s for AI and machine learning with Kubeflow.
Watch how to build a machine learning model on Ubuntu and Kubeflow ›
Networking
Kubernetes imposes fundamental requirements on your networking implementation including:
- All containers have to communicate with all other containers without NAT
- All nodes have to communicate with all containers (and vice-versa) without NAT
- The IP that a container sees itself as needs to be the same IP that others see it as
Kubernetes uses Container Network Interface (CNI) as an interface between network providers and Kubernetes networking. CNI is a library definition and a set of tools, under the umbrella of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.
CNI plugins
Charmed Kubernetes comes pre-packaged with several tested CNI plugins like Calico and Flannel. Our distribution of Kubernetes is open and extensible — bring your favourite CNI plugin and extend it.
- Secure network connectivity for containers and virtual machine
- Flat layer 3 network without encapsulation
- Fully routable IP address
- Bare metal performance
- IP-in-IP tunnelling for overlay support
- Dynamic network security rules
- Fine-grained control over communications between containers, virtual machine workloads, and bare metal host endpoints.
- Production scale
For assistance with your private cloud network underlay, leverage Canonical's work with hyperscale public clouds such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services, with deep insight into the dynamics of cloud network performance and security best practices for large-scale multi-tenanted operations.
Storage
Kubernetes comes with a powerful volume plugin system that enables many different types of storage systems to:
- Automatically create storage when required.
- Make storage available to containers wherever they're scheduled.
- Automatically delete the storage when no longer needed.
To improve the extensibility of the storage feature set and plugin ecosystem, Kubernetes provides a Container Storage Interface (CSI). CSI enables storage plugins to be developed independent from the Kubernetes GitHub tree, containerized, deployed via standard Kubernetes primitives, and consumed through the Kubernetes storage primitives users know and love (, , ). The next dot release of Charmed Kubernetes will provide early access to CSI.
Logging and monitoring
Operations in highly coherent large-scale distributed clusters require a new level of operational monitoring and observability. Charmed Kubernetes provides a standardised set of open source log aggregation and systems monitoring dashboards with every cloud, using Prometheus, the Elasticsearch and Kibana stack (ELK), and Nagios.
Get started with Charmed Kubernetes
Find out how Canonical enables Kubernetes on demand for your DevOps teams — on OpenStack, VMware, public clouds, and bare metal clusters.