VMware's Kubernetes Academy pushes the company's container orchestration play

Dive Brief:

VMware this week launched the Kubernetes Academy, building on a week of VMworld Conference hype and a push to evolve the company's virtualization tool into a Kubernetes-native platform.
The academy is free, product-agnostic and caters to all technology levels, according to the announcement. Coursework is comprised of short videos taught by VMware Kubernetes experts.
Courses include introductory lessons on containers and Kubernetes and a primer on how to interact with Kubernetes. The academy also has a prep course for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam.

Dive Insight:

VMware helped pioneer the virtualization space, allowing users to use a single computer to run several operating systems. In server virtualization, companies can run multiple virtual machines on a single, physical server.

But many organizations are moving away from physical storage and instead tapping service providers to host infrastructure in a cloud-based environment. More companies execute software- and application-based strategies, requiring a new way to operate code.

Containers have emerged as the solution, packaging software code and "dependencies" so applications can run in any computing environment, as platform as a service company Docker explains.

Open-source Kubernetes — created by Google but now run by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — acts as a container orchestration system, which helps organizations manage the container lifecycle. It has become the industry standard for container orchestration.

Containers and Kubernetes are a foundational component of VMware's forward-looking strategy, especially since by 2022, Gartner expects three-quarters of companies to run "containerized applications in production."

With the academy, the more technology workers VMware can get educated on running Kuberenetes, the larger the workforce is to evangelize the container orchestration technology and deliver it in-house to companies across industries.

VMware is pushing an "any cloud, any device" strategy, serving as a technology-agnostic layer between large-scale cloud service providers. The planned purchase of software development platform Pivotal fits into VMware's strategy to create a "comprehensive Kubernetes portfolio," according to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.