My team and i tried leveraging different pivotal products as part of a test deployment of our current esxi managed vm deployment imagined through the pivotal kubernetes deploy.
We found that Pivotal's kubernetes makes it easy to run kubernetes on top of existing vmware infrastructure, so our ops team could continue to manage their normal vmware stack, with an admin interface to manage kubernetes clusters that live within esxi. They could provision us devs with a cluster for a specific use, and hand us the keys to do the rest.
It was pretty cool, except for the fact that we discovered kernel incompatibility with the underlying esxi version/os that brought down the entire deployment repeatedly a few days before the event where we intended to stress test the product.
The use case is definitely there for larger orgs who want to share hardware, but you also get the "on prem cloud" quick wins. Our experiment obviously failed in a low risk way, but i think the idea is sound.
I think the terminology is a little silly but presenting your devs with an abstract view of the underlying physical/virtual infrastructure is good for the ops and dev teams in terms of flexibility.
It’s a framework that makes it hard for one side to accidentally depend on something they shouldn’t.
Here i am just referring to the ease of using iaas offerings like s3 buckets but through on prem hardware. Devs build against drop in blob storage apis as if we lived in aws, and my ops guys still manage the backing vms.
