We created Cloud Load Control with these requirements in mind. It is basically a distribution of Kubernetes targeted for on-premise use, primarily focusing on operational aspects of container infrastructure. We are committed to work with the community, and contribute all relevant changes and extensions upstream to the Kubernetes project.
**On-premise deployments**
As Kubernetes core developer Tim Hockin often puts it in his[talks](https://speakerdeck.com/thockin), Kubernetes is "a story with two parts" where setting up a Kubernetes cluster is not the easy part and often challenging due to variations in infrastructure. This is in particular true when it comes to production-ready deployments of Kubernetes. In the public cloud space, a customer could choose a service like Google Container Engine (GKE) to do this job. Since customers have less options on-premise, often they have to consider the deployment by themselves.
Cloud Load Control addresses these issues. It enables customers to reliably and readily provision a production grade Kubernetes clusters on their own infrastructure, with the following benefits:
- Proven setup process, lowers risk of problems while setting up the cluster
- Reduction of provisioning time to minutes
- Repeatable process, relevant especially for large, multi-tenant environments
Cloud Load Control delivers these benefits for a range of platforms, starting from selected OpenStack distributions in the first versions of Cloud Load Control, and successively adding more platforms depending on customer demand. We are especially excited about the option to remove the virtualization layer and support Kubernetes bare-metal on Fujitsu servers in the long run. By removing a layer of complexity, the total cost to run the system would be decreased and the missing hypervisor would increase performance.
Right now we are in the process of contributing a generic provider to set up Kubernetes on OpenStack. As a next step in driving multi-platform support, Docker-based deployment of Kubernetes seems to be crucial. We plan to contribute to this feature to ensure it is going to be Beta in Kubernetes 1.3.
**Efficient operations**
Reducing operation costs is the target of any organization providing IT infrastructure. This can be achieved by increasing the efficiency of operations and helping operators to get their job done. Considering large-scale container infrastructures, we found it is important to differentiate between two types of operations:
- Platform-oriented, relates to the overall infrastructure, often including various systems, one of which might be Kubernetes.
- Application-oriented, focusses rather on a single, or a small set of applications deployed on Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is already great for the application-oriented part. Cloud Load Control was created to help platform-oriented operators to efficiently manage Kubernetes as part of the overall infrastructure and make it easy to execute Kubernetes tasks relevant to them.
The first version of Cloud Load Control provides a user interface integrated in the OpenStack Horizon dashboard which enables the Platform ops to create and manage their Kubernetes clusters.
