Manage Containerized Workloads Anywhere with VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations

Darin Zook and Camille Crowell co-wrote this blog post.

When it comes to managing workloads efficiently on disparate infrastructure types, operations teams face a variety of blockers. Whether those workloads land in private clouds, public clouds, or at the edge, increasing your operational scale can be a double-edged sword. You can create more resiliency by separating environments and capitalizing on services from various providers, but doing so also means your operators are going to face difficulty stitching it all together. Then when Kubernetes is added on top of those disparate infrastructure types, teams get bogged down in the manual provisioning and management of their growing, and increasingly fragmented, Kubernetes estate. It can cause infrastructure teams a lot of heartburn when, in the name of agility, they have inadvertently created another set of management silos. At VMware, we affectionately term this disparate infrastructure dilemma “cloud chaos.”

VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations helps infrastructure and operations teams eliminate cross-cloud Kubernetes management silos so they can simplify, secure, and optimize Kubernetes operations for any Kubernetes on any cloud. Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations is designed to enable Kubernetes cluster managers and consumers to move faster while retaining security, networking, and compliance requirements. As we are seeing increased adoption of Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, we’re hearing from customers that they’re able to implement the necessary tooling to simplify Kubernetes operations at scale, adopt a holistic approach to security across their entire software supply chain, and achieve faster development cycles for the workloads the business depends on. 

VMware is helping customers achieve simplified, secure, and optimized Kubernetes estates with Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations in the following ways:

• Get Kubernetes up and running quickly – Quick deployment of Kubernetes clusters anywhere is enabled by VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, which is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation–conformant runtime that offers lifecycle management, monitoring, and container registry to enable consistent, on-demand access to infrastructure services across clouds and at the edge. At VMware Explore in San Francisco earlier this year, we announced Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0, which included a unified, declarative API and enhanced application lifecycle management capabilities. Building on this, today at VMware Explore 2022 Europe, we announced Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1, which adds even more flexibility and choice for customers on their multi-cloud journey, including virtual machine (VM)–based management cluster models, and more public cloud options.

• Automated, policy-driven management and security – Platform operators can benefit from expedited management and compliant security across multiple clusters and clouds through a unified management plane. VMware Tanzu Mission Control allows operators to manage cluster configuration via UI, CLI, and also GitOps toolchains while supporting consistent deployment of new workloads and images no matter where they live. The recent announcement of lifecycle management for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service enables customers to manage the entire lifecycle of newly provisioned Amazon EKS clusters, supporting their multi-cloud efforts. Data protection capabilities were also expanded with cross-cluster restore and the VMware Tanzu team is working to add support for self-managed, private deployments of Tanzu Mission Control.

• Observe and unify data-driven insights – Customers can enable consistent infrastructure and application performance and reliability with a unified observability platform. VMware Aria Operations for Applications brings together metrics, traces, and logs to provide a holistic view of multi-cloud Kubernetes platform operations to provide actionable insights and reduce mean-time-to-resolution at enterprise scale.

• Connect and protect applications across clusters – Platform teams can deliver a Kubernetes estate that enables end-to-end secure connectivity, resiliency, security, and insights for modern applications running in single and multi-cloud environments. At VMware Explore in San Francisco, we announced new bot management capabilities to the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, allowing organizations to identify, classify, and act on malicious bot traffic, helping customers maintain a consistent security posture with operational simplicity, extending protection from traditional to cloud native container-based applications deployed across multi-cloud environments. At VMware Explore Europe, we announced that NSX Advanced Load Balancer will gain new visibility and inventory capabilities as part of PULSE Cloud Service, which will provide greater insights into load-balancer traffic across multi-cloud deployments. This change is planned to come by the end of the year.
  
  At VMware Explore Europe, we showed a preview of upcoming enhancements to VMware Tanzu Service Mesh that are designed to improve the discoverability and attachment of clusters so that you can more easily find and protect Kubernetes clusters across clouds. With this change, Tanzu Service Mesh will help operations teams automatically discover Kubernetes clusters and then enable onboarding of those clusters for secure connectivity. In addition, the new upcoming GitOps support will further unify operations with Kubernetes clusters. 
  
  Secondly, the Tanzu Service Mesh team is unveiling a preview of new capabilities that would provide VM discovery and integration into the mesh, providing the ability to combine VMs and containers in the same service mesh for secure communications and to apply consistent policy. Tanzu Service Mesh provides operations teams the ability to streamline and accelerate the deployment and management of application-level policies for application developers, security, and operations while easing the automation of CI/CD pipelines, DevSecOps, and related application workflows across multi-cloud environments.

Kubernetes journeys are all unique

VMware is continuing to build new capabilities in Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations that focus on customer success and business outcomes. No matter where you are in your modern application journey, VMware sees and understands that no two application modernization journeys are alike. We regularly receive and adopt feedback from our customers and communities that we use to enhance our products.  

And remember: even though your organization’s needs are unique, that doesn’t mean you have to tackle app and cloud transformation alone. VMware Tanzu Labs engineers and architects can work side-by-side with your teams to build a cloud native platform and modernize your application portfolio—all while imparting the knowledge and skills your organization needs for long-term success with these initiatives. Operationalize your cloud native platform and get to production faster with help from Tanzu Labs platform engineers during a VMware Tanzu Activation Services engagement. Get the most from your new platform with VMware’s Rapid Portfolio Modernization program. Using intelligent tools and agile techniques, our experts can quickly identify modernization opportunities and cost savings across your application portfolio and work with you to design and execute a portfolio modernization program that delivers more value to your business. 

‘Cloud smart’ is the destination

Every organization wants to reach the “cloud smart” destination of their multi-cloud journey, where they have the freedom to select the right cloud for the right application, based on individual application needs. As some VMware customers have already indicated, the cloud smart approach can enable faster application development, a consistent enterprise infrastructure, delivered with a frictionless experience for end users and customers. 

Learn more about modern foundations of Kubernetes applications

Learn more about Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations on this product page, or watch replays of two sessions about it from VMware Explore Europe 2022:    

• Bring Dev and Ops Together with Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations

• Learn What It Takes to Operate a Multi-Cloud, Kubernetes-Based Platform

*VMware makes no guarantee that services announced in preview or private beta will become available at a future date. The information in this blog post is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.