SmartX’s container management and service product – SMTX Kubernetes Service (SKS), has received certification from the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
According to CNCF, this program ensures that every vendor’s version of Kubernetes supports the required APIs, as do open source community versions. For organizations using Kubernetes, conformance enables interoperability from one Kubernetes installation to the next, thus allowing them the flexibility to choose between vendors. There are over 90 certified Kubernetes offerings from the world’s leading enterprise software vendors and cloud computing providers.
Being certified means that SKS is truly open and conformant. Kubernetes clusters created by SKS support cloud-native addons and can be managed by mainstream container cloud platforms. The experience with SKS is almost consistent with using upstream Kubernetes. Users can build widely compatible Kubernetes clusters with SKS, avoiding vendor lock-in.
SKS 1.0 was released in July, offering a one-stop solution to build production-ready Kubernetes clusters. Since its release, SKS has been deployed in the production environments of customers. Based on customer feedback, SmartX has released SKS 1.1.0, with the following updates:
- Enhance cluster high availability to ensure business continuity.
- Enable automatic scaling of workload cluster nodes to meet varying business workload demands and achieve flexible resource allocation.
- Automatically replace failed nodes in the workload cluster to improve cluster availability.
- Place Control Plane nodes on separate physical hosts to ensure high availability of the SKS cluster’s control plane.
- Support more extensive cluster parameter configurations.
- Support configuring parameters for core components of the workload cluster, such as etcd, kube-apiserver, kube-controller-manager, kube-scheduler, and kubelet.
- Support configuring parameters for addons in the workload cluster, such as Calico CNI, SMTX ELF CSI, Prometheus, EFK, MetalLB, Contour, and Cluster Autoscaler.
- Support configuring time zones for both the management cluster and the workload cluster.
- Enhance capabilities of SMTX ELF CSI.
- Support online volume expansion, volume snapshot creation, volume provisioning from snapshots, and cloning of persistent volumes with SMTX ELF CSI.
- Simplify cluster operations and maintenance.
- Support automatic renewal of control plane certificates for both the management cluster and the workload cluster.
- Support pausing or resuming synchronization between the management cluster and the workload cluster, suitable for cluster maintenance, troubleshooting, and other scenarios.
SmartX will continue to invest in cloud-native infrastructure and AI scenarios to provide a full-lifecycle, production-ready, and flexible solution for customers.
Learn more about SKS: download the SMTX Kubernetes Service Product Brief or check the SKS features and specifications.
