Huawei CloudFabric Supports Container Network Deployment Automation, Improving Enterprise Service Agility

/ -- At HUAWEI CONNECT 2018, Huawei announced that its CloudFabric Cloud Data Center Solution supports container network deployment automation and will be available for the industry-leading enterprise Kubernetes platform via a new plug-in. This solution will be designed to enable customers to obtain a unified network architecture for containers, virtual machines (VMs), and bare metal servers (BMSs), improving service agility. Huawei is collaborating with Red Hat[1] to enable interconnection between Huawei CloudFabric and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with a goal of building a next-generation container network collaboration solution.

Container and VM technologies for computing virtualization coexist in data centers. With the maturity of VMs, container clusters are becoming mainstream service platforms due to their low resource usage, fast startup, and easy migration. After an enterprise begins to deploy containers in production systems, traditional manual configuration and deployment methods can become inefficient at handling basic requirements such as fast container provisioning, unified management, and security isolation. Enterprises need more-agile methods.

Via the plug-in that Red Hat and Huawei are designing, Huawei CloudFabric will be available for industry-leading container solutions such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, an enterprise Kubernetes platform that is a more secure, consistent foundation to deliver applications, with full-stack automated operations and streamlined developer workflows to get to market faster. The Huawei solution can automatically identify containerized micro-service requirements that are defined in the container platform, convert the requirements into network policies, and deliver policies automatically. Huawei CloudFabric can support login and logout of 10k containers per minute, implementing elastic and on-demand resource scaling. Users can check resource availability in advance and perform closed-loop verification after configuration to enable smooth service operations. In addition, Huawei CloudFabric's standard open architecture will be optimized for mainstream container platforms such as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to provide a ready solution for commercial use.

Huawei has been devoted to the container open source community for many years, where Red Hat is also a leader. Both Red Hat (#3) and Huawei (#4) are among the top contributors to the open source Kubernetes project[2]; Huawei is the top provider of Kubernetes container technology among Chinese vendors and the sole Chinese representative of the Kubernetes Technical Oversight Committee.

Mr. Mark Wohlfarth, Global Head of Network Ecosystem for Red Hat said, "Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is one of the most widely used and most comprehensive enterprise-class Kubernetes platforms in the industry. I believe that the cooperation with Huawei CloudFabric Cloud Data Center Solution helps meet customers' requirements for container-based applications."
Mr. Yu Tao, Director of Huawei Data Center Network Solution, said, "The data center is the core of the enterprise digital platform. In the data center network field, Huawei adheres to open innovation. Huawei CloudFabric supports container network deployment automation, helping customers easily manage all workloads through a single control interface and achieve service agility and innovation. Through cooperation with Red Hat, we hope that more enterprises can obtain complete and mature commercial solutions."
[2] Data from Stackalytics as of Oct. 18, 2018