Multi-cloud Kubernetes management

VMware Tanzu Mission Control is a centralized management platform for consistently operating and securing your Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across multiple teams and clouds.

It provides operators with a single control point to give developers the independence they need to drive business forward, while enabling consistent management and operations across environments for increased security and governance.

The key capabilities of Tanzu Mission Control include:

• Cluster lifecycle management: Provision, scale, upgrade and delete Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters via Tanzu Mission Control across environments.
• Attaching clusters: Attach any conformant Kubernetes clusters running in other environments—either on-prem or in public clouds—to Tanzu Mission Control for centralized management.
• Centralized policy management: Apply consistent policies, such as access, security, and even custom policies to a fleet of clusters and namespaces at scale.
• Observability and diagnostics: Gain global observability of the health of clusters and workloads across clouds for quick diagnostics and troubleshooting.
• Data protection: Create and schedule backup and restore of your clusters and/or namespaces using Tanzu Mission Control’s UI, CLI, and API, leveraging built-in open source Velero project.
• Identity and access management: Implement centralized authentication and authorization and federated identity from multiple sources, such as AD, LDAP, and SAML.
• Cluster inspection: Conduct cluster inspections, such as cluster conformance Inspection and Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark Inspection, for configuration and security issues.
• Integration with other Tanzu products: Seamlessly consume other Tanzu products by integrating them with Tanzu Mission Control. Get deeper Kubernetes observability and analytics with Tanzu Observability, and get microservices-level connectivity and traffic management with Tanzu Service Mesh.

Tanzu Mission Control benefits both the applications teams and operations teams by

• increasing developer agility and productivity through enabling them with self-service access to Kubernetes clusters;
• enhancing operational efficiency by enabling operators to centrally observe and manage multiple clusters across disparate teams and environments at scale; and
• strengthening security and compliance by allowing operators to consistently apply security policies across environments and do regular cluster inspection for potential risks.

The infrastructure and platform teams use Tanzu Mission Control to enable the developers with self-service access to Kubernetes, and at the same time, centrally operate and manage the Kubernetes clusters and modern apps running on them with efficiency, consistency, and security.

The application teams use Tanzu Mission Control to better manage and maintain applications by easily deploying services and workloads across clusters, better understanding the health of applications and quickly troubleshooting issues.

Yes. Tanzu Mission Control allows you to provision Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters directly in Tanzu Mission Control and to perform lifecycle management of these provisioned clusters via UI, API, or CLI. Today, Tanzu Mission Control supports provisioning, scaling, upgrading, and deleting Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters in vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud on AWS, and Azure VMware Solution. Support for other environments is coming later.

You can attach CNCF conformant Kubernetes clusters to Tanzu Mission Control no matter where they are running: on vSphere, in any public clouds, or through other Kubernetes vendors.

Yes. A key design principle of Tanzu Mission Control is extensibility into organizations’ existing workflows and toolkits. Tanzu Mission Control provides this through a documented API, with a CLI and UI for ease of use.

No. Tanzu Mission Control today is a SaaS in the VMware Cloud Services portfolio.

We use open source technologies to build core functionalities of Tanzu Mission Control. For example, Project Sonobuoy is behind the cluster conformance inspection functionality, and Project Velero is leveraged to build the data protection function, and we use Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper for policy enforcement.

Today, Tanzu Mission Control integrates with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Tanzu Observability, and Tanzu Service Mesh. We are working on adding more integrations with other Tanzu products.

Yes, Tanzu Mission Control Starter is a free tier of Tanzu Mission Control, which will provide its users a set of core Kubernetes management functionalities such as global visibility and policy control over any conformant Kubernetes clusters anywhere—on-premises, in public clouds, and at the edge.

You can either use Tanzu Mission Control Starter to manage your Tanzu Kubernetes clusters or to manage clusters from other vendors, such as Amazon EKS, Google GKE, or Azure AKS.

Tanzu Mission Control Starter is not currently available yet, but you can sign up to stay updated on features and general availability here.

Tanzu Mission Control has three commercial versions:

• Tanzu Mission Control Essentials was made specifically for VMware Cloud offerings such as VMware Cloud on AWS, and can only be purchased/accessed via VMware Cloud offerings.
• Tanzu Mission Control Standard can only be purchased via the Tanzu Standard edition.
• Tanzu Mission Control Advanced can be purchased either standalone or via the Tanzu Advanced edition.

This feature comparison chart shows which features are included in each version.

Tanzu Mission Control also has a free version: Tanzu Mission Control Starter. Please see the above related question for more details.