CoreOS has added Microsoft Azure support to its Kubernetes distribution, which the company calls Tectonic, to help enterprises avoid cloud vendor lock-in. Tectonic previously supported Amazon Web Services and bare metal servers.

And the new version of Tectonic, 1.7, now supports one-click upgrades, so companies don't have to endure downtime to upgrade, Rob Szumski, CoreOS Tectonic product manager, tells Enterprise Cloud News.

Microsoft Azure support means the new version of Tectonic has better support for hybrid clouds, and allows enterprises to move workloads between Azure, AWS and bare metal, Szumski says.

"Hybrid readiness is what we're seeing every customer asking for. The CIOs of the Fortune 2000 are very wise to vendor lock-in on cloud," Szumski says.

Additionally, Tectonic 1.7 adds built-in monitoring alerts for events such as a lost node and application downtime, as well as traffic restrictions between containers for security.

Figure 1: Rob Szumski, CoreOS Tectonic product manager, was the second employee at the company, which now numbers 125.

Keep up with the latest enterprise cloud news and insights. Sign up for the weekly Enterprise Cloud News newsletter.

CoreOS bills Tectonic as an "enterprise-ready Kubernetes stack," based on the standard upstream Kubernetes distribution, with management and security features and support for LDAP and SAML authentication protocols popular in the enterprise, Szumski says.

Competitors include Red Hat and VMware.

CoreOS is not ruling out support for other major cloud platforms, Google and IBM. "We're following customer demand," Szumski says. "Folks were clamoring for Azure support. We'll follow the customers where they want us to go.

Related posts:

— Mitch Wagner Editor, Enterprise Cloud News

CALLING ALL CLOUD, NFV AND SDN COMPANIES:
Make sure your company and services are listed free of charge at Virtuapedia, the comprehensive set of searchable databases covering the companies, products, industry organizations and people that are directly involved in defining and shaping the virtualization industry.