Tanzu Application Platform Archives

Momentum in the Cloud: Crafting Your Winning Strategy with VMware Cloud

Jul 27, 2023 | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, Data Protection, Edge Computing, Equinix, Google Cloud, HCX, Kubernetes, NSX, Observability, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Security, Supercloud, Tanzu Application Platform, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Explore, vSAN, vSphere

The time is right for VMware Cloud! In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern business, embracing the cloud has become essential for organizations seeking to stay competitive and agile. The allure of increased scalability, cost-efficiency, and flexibility has driven enterprises of all sizes to embark on cloud migration journeys. However, the road to a successful cloud adoption is often coming with challenges. Slow and failed migrations have given rise to what experts call the “cloud paradox,” where the very technology meant to accelerate progress ends up hindering it.

As businesses navigate through this paradox, finding the right strategy to harness the full potential of the cloud becomes paramount. One solution that has emerged as a beacon of hope in this complex landscape is VMware Cloud. With its multi-cloud approach, which is also known as supercloud, VMware Cloud provides organizations the ability to craft a winning strategy that capitalizes on momentum while minimizing the risks associated with cloud migrations.

The Experimental Phase is Over

Is it really though? The experimental phase was an exciting journey of discovery for organizations seeking the potential of multi-cloud environments. Companies have explored different cloud providers, tested a variety of cloud services, and experimented with workloads and applications in the cloud. It allowed them to understand the benefits and drawbacks of each cloud platform, assess performance, security and compliance aspects, and determine how well each cloud provider aligns with their unique business needs.

The Paradox of Cloud and Choice

With an abundance of cloud service providers, each offering distinct features and capabilities, decision-makers can find themselves overwhelmed with options. The quest to optimize workloads across multiple clouds can lead to unintended complexities, such as increased operational overhead, inconsistent management practices/tools, and potential vendor lock-in.

Furthermore, managing data and applications distributed across various cloud environments can create challenges related to security, compliance, and data sovereignty. The lack of standardized practices and tools in a multi-cloud setup can also hinder collaboration and agility, negating the very advantages that public cloud environments promise to deliver.

Multi-Cloud Complexity

(Public) Cloud computing is often preached for its cost-efficiency, enabling businesses to pay for resources on-demand and avoid capital expenditures on physical infrastructure. However, the cloud paradox reveals that organizations can inadvertently accumulate hidden costs, such as data egress fees, storage overage charges, and the cost of cloud management tools. Without careful planning and oversight, the cloud’s financial benefits might be offset by unexpected expenses.

Why Cloud Migrations are Slowing Down

Failed expectations. The first reasons my customers mention are cost and complexity.

While the cloud offers potential cost savings in the long run, the initial investment and perceived uncertainty in calculating the total cost of ownership can deter some organizations from moving forward with cloud migrations. Budget constraints and difficulties in accurately estimating and analyzing cloud expenses lead to a cautious approach to cloud adoption.

One significant factor impeding cloud migrations is the complexity of the process itself. Moving entire infrastructures, applications, and data to the cloud requires thorough planning, precise execution, and in-depth knowledge of cloud platforms and technologies. Many organizations lack the in-house expertise to handle such a massive undertaking, leading to delays and apprehensions about potential risks.

Other underestimated reasons are legacy systems and applications that have been in use for many years and are often deeply ingrained within an organization’s operations. Migrating these systems to the cloud may require extensive reconfiguration or complete redevelopment, making the migration process both time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Reverse Cloud Migrations

While I don’t advertise a case for repatriation, I would like to share the idea that companies should think about workload mobility, application portability, and repatriation upfront. You can infinitely optimize your cloud spend, but if cloud costs start to outpace your transformation plans or revenue growth, it is too late already.

Embracing a Smart Approach with VMware Cloud

To address the cloud paradox and maximize the potential of multi-cloud environments, VMware is embracing the cloud-smart approach. This approach is designed to empower organizations with a unified and consistent platform to manage and operate their applications across multiple clouds.

Single Cloud Operating Model: A single operating model that spans private and public clouds. This consistency simplifies cloud management, enabling seamless workload migration and minimizing the complexities associated with multiple cloud providers.
Flexible Cloud Choice: VMware allows organizations to choose the cloud provider that best suits their specific needs, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud infrastructure. This freedom of choice ensures that businesses can leverage the unique advantages of each cloud while maintaining operational consistency.
Streamlined Application Management: A cloud-smart approach centralizes application management, making it easier to deploy, secure, and monitor applications across multi-cloud environments. This streamlines processes, enhances collaboration, and improves operational efficiency.
Enhanced Security and Compliance: By adopting VMware’s security solutions, businesses can implement consistent security policies across all clouds, ensuring data protection and compliance adherence regardless of the cloud provider.

Why VMware Cloud?

This year I realized that a lot of VMware customers came back to me because their cloud-first strategy did not work as expected. Costs exploded, migrations were failing, and their project timeline changed many times. Also, partners like Microsoft and AWS want to collaborate more with VMware, because the public cloud giants cannot deliver as expected.

Customers and public cloud providers did not see any value in lifting and shifting workloads from on-premises data centers to the public. Now the exact same people, companies and partners (AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc.) are back to ask for VMware their support, and solutions that can speed up cloud migrations while reducing risks.

This is why I am always suggesting a “lift and learn” approach, which removes pressure and reduces costs.

Organizations view the public cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation. Gartner forecasted in April 2023 that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is going to experience the highest spending growth in 2023, followed by PaaS.

It is said that companies spend most of their money for compute, storage, and data services when using Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. Guess what, VMware Cloud is a perfect fit for IaaS-based workloads (instead of using AWS EC2, Google’s Compute Engine, and Azure Virtual machine instances)!

Who doesn’t like the idea of cost savings and faster cloud migrations?

Disaster Recovery and FinOps

When you migrate workloads to the cloud, you have to rethink your disaster recovery and ransomware recovery strategy. Have a look at VMware’s DRaaS (Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service) offering which includes ransomware recovery capabilities as well.

If you want to analyze and optimize your cloud spend, try out VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth.

Final Words

VMware’s approach is not right for everyone, but it is a future-proof cloud strategy that enables organizations to adapt their cloud strategies as business needs to evolve. The cloud-smart approach offers a compelling solution, providing businesses with a unified, consistent, and flexible platform to succeed in multi-cloud environments. By embracing this approach, organizations can overcome the complexities of multi-cloud, unlock new possibilities, and set themselves on a path to cloud success.

And you still get the same access to the native public cloud services.

VMware Tanzu Licensing – What’s New?

May 9, 2023 | AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, CNCF, Edge Computing, ESXi, Kubernetes, NSX, Observability, Tanzu, Tanzu Application Platform, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Data, vSphere

Last year, VMware gave the Tanzu portfolio a fairly good facelift with all the announcements from VMware Explore 2022. It is clear to me that VMware focuses on multi-cluster and multi-cloud Kubernetes management capabilities (Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations) and a superior developer experience with any Kubernetes on any cloud (Tanzu Application Platform). VMware embraces native public clouds and so it was very exciting for many customers when they announced the lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters – the direct provisioning and management of EKS clusters with Tanzu Mission Control. But what happened in the last 6 to 9 months since VMware Explore US and Europe? And how do I get parts of the VMware Tanzu portfolio nowadays?

Tanzu Licensing

Let us start with licensing first. in October 2022, VMware made it clear that they do not want to move forward anymore with the Tanzu Basic and Advanced editions, only Tanzu Standard was left. VMware replaced Tanzu Basic with “Tanzu Kubernetes Grid” (TKG), which comes with the following components:

vSphere capabilities / K8s Runtime
K8s Cluster Lifecycle Management – Cluster API
Image Registry – Harbor
Container Networking – Antrea/Calico
Load Balancing – NSX Advanced Load Balancer
Ingress Controller – Contour
Observability – Fluent Bit, Prometheus, Grafana
Operating System – Photon OS, Ubuntu, bring-your-own node image
Data Protection – Velero

Note: Nothing is official yet, but according to this article intended for partners, VMware is going to announce the Tanzu Standard EOA (End of Availability) soon:

…containing updated information on Tanzu Standard entering end of availability (EOA) and the new Tanzu Kubernetes Operations and Tanzu Application Platform partner resources.

Looking at the “Tanzu Explainer” and its changelog from the 5th of May, one can find the following: “Updated to reflect new Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations SKUs“.

Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations Bundles

The Tanzu Explainer on Tech Zone lists the following new bundles/packages for Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations (TKO):

Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations Foundation includes Tanzu Mission Control Advanced and Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced. Two add-on SKUs are available—one adds Antrea Advanced and Aria Operations for Applications, the other adds these plus NSX Advanced Load Balancer Enterprise. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is not included in this bundle.
Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations includes Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Tanzu Mission Control Advanced, Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced, Antrea Advanced, and Aria Operations for Applications.
Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations with NSX Advanced Load Balancer includes Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Tanzu Mission Control Advanced, Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced, Antrea Advanced, Aria Operations for Applications, and NSX Advanced Load Balancer Enterprise.

Note: Since Tanzu Mission Control Standard (TMC) was only sold as part of the Tanzu Standard Edition, we see VMware moving forward with TMC Advanced only. Which is good! But TMC Essentials still comes with vSphere+ and VMC on AWS.

Tanzu Entitlements with vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation Editions

What about vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)? Let me give you an overview here as well:

vSphere+ Standard – No Tanzu entitlements included
vSphere+ – Includes TKG and TMC Essentials
vSphere Enterprise+ with TKG – Includes TKG
VMware Cloud Foundation – All VCF editions have Tanzu Standard included

Note: We do not know yet what the Tanzu Standard EOA means for the Tanzu entitlements with VCF. Need to wait for guidance.

VMware Cloud Packs

In April 2023, VMware introduced new bundles called VMware Cloud Packs and they come in four different flavours:

Compute with Advanced Automation. vSphere+ and Aria Universal Suite Advanced
HCI. vSphere+, vSAN+ Advanced and Aria Universal Suite Standard
HCI with Advanced Automation. vSphere+, vSAN+ Advanced and Aria Universal Suite Advanced
VMware Cloud Foundation. vSphere+, vSAN+ Enterprise, NSX Enterprise Plus, SDDC Manager, Aria Universal Suite Enterprise, Aria Operations for Networks Enterprise add-on

In addition to these four Cloud Packs offerings, customers can get the following add-ons:

Data Protection & Disaster Recovery
Network Detection and Response
Tanzu Mission Control
Ransomware Recovery
Advanced Load Balancer
Workload and Endpoint Security
Intrusion Detection and Prevention
VDI/Desktops

Note: As you can see, all new cloud packs have TKG included and TMC is an add-on. vCenter Standard is with connected and disconnected subscriptions.

Important: Please note as well that the individual components of the bundles cannot be upgraded independently. Example – Aria Universal Suite Standard as part of the HCI Cloud Pack cannot be upgraded to Aria Universal Suite Enterprise.

Conclusion

VMware is clearly moving in the right direction: They want to simplify their portfolio and improve how customers can consume/subscribe services. As always, it is going to take a while until they have figured out which bundles and product versions make sense for most of the customers. Be patient. 🙂

Open Source and Vendor Lock-In

Jan 12, 2023 | AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, CNCF, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Observability, Tanzu, Tanzu Application Platform

When talking about multi-cloud and cost efficiency, open source is often discussed because it can be deployed and operated on all private and public clouds. From my experience and conversations with customers, open source is most of the time directly connected to discussions about vendor lock-ins.

Organizations want to avoid or minimize the use of proprietary software to avoid becoming dependent on a particular vendor or service. And there are different factors like proprietary technology or service, or long-term contracts. It is also about not giving a specific supplier leverage over your organization – for example when this supplier is increasing their prices. Another reason to avoid vendor lock-in is the notion that proprietary software can limit or reduce innovation in your environment.

CNCF and Kubernetes

Let us take Kubernetes as an example. Kubernetes, which is also known as K8s, was contributed as an open-source seed technology by Google to the Linux Foundation in 2015, which formed the sub-foundation “Cloud Native Computing Foundation” (CNCF). Founding CNCF members include companies like Google, Red Hat, Intel, Cisco, IBM, and VMware.

Currently, the CNCF has over 167k project contributors, over 800 members, and more than 130 certified Kubernetes distributions and platforms. Open source projects and the adoption of cloud native technologies are constantly growing.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, its members, and contributors have the same mission in mind. They want to provide drive the cloud native adoption by providing open and cloud native software that “can be implemented on a variety of architectures and operating systems”. This is one of the values described in the CNCF mission statement).

If we access the CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape, one will get an understanding of how many open source projects are supported by the CNCF and this open source community.

CNCF Landscape Jan 2023

Since donated to CNCF, a lot of companies on this planet are using Kubernetes, or at least a distribution of it:

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Distro (Amazon EKS-D)
Azure (AKS) Engine
Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service
K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
MetalK8s
Oracle Cloud Native Environment
Rancher Kubernetes
Red Hat OpenShift
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG)

A distribution, or distro, is when a vendor takes core Kubernetes — that’s the unmodified, open source code (although some modify it) — and packages it for redistribution. Usually, this entails finding and validating the Kubernetes software and providing a mechanism to handle cluster installation and upgrades. Many Kubernetes distributions include other proprietary or open source applications.

These were just a few of the total 66 certified Kubernetes distributions. What about the certified hosted Kubernetes service offerings? Let me list here some of the popular ones out of the 53 total:

Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK)
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (formerly Karbon)
Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE)
Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated

While Kubernetes is open source, different vendors create curated versions of Kubernetes, add some proprietary services, and then offer it as a managed service. The notion of open source is that you can take all of your applications and their components and leave a specific cloud provider if needed.

Trade-Offs

Open source software can make cloud migrations easier in some ways (e.g., if you use the same database in all the clouds). Kubernetes is designed to be cloud-agnostic, meaning that it can run on multiple cloud platforms. This can make it easier to move applications and workloads between different clouds without needing to rewrite the code or reconfigure the infrastructure. At least this was the expectation of Kubernetes. And it should be clear by now, that a managed service or platform means a lock-in. No matter if this is GKE, EKS, AKS, or VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes.

You cannot avoid a (vendor) lock-in. You have the same with open source. It is about trade-offs.

If you deploy workloads in multiple clouds, you end up with different vendors/partners, different solutions, and technologies. For me, it is about operations at the end of the day. How do you manage and operate multiple clouds and their different managed services? How do you deploy and use open source software in different clouds?

I have not seen one customer saying that they moved away from AKS, EKS, GKE, or Tanzu and went back to the upstream version of Kubernetes and built the application platform around it by themselves from scratch with other open source projects. You can do it, but you need someone who did that before and can guide you. Why?

There are other container-related technologies like databases, streaming & messaging, service proxies, API gateways, cloud native storage, container runtimes, service meshes, and cloud native network projects. Let us have a look at the different categories and examples:

Database, 62 different projects (Cassandra, MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, Scylla)
Storage, 66 different projects (Container Storage Interface, MinIO, Velero)
Network, 25 different projects (Antrea, Cilium, Flannel, Container Network Interface, Open vSwitch, Calico, NGINX)
Service Proxy, 21 different projects (Contour, Envoy, HAProxy, MetalLB, NGINX)
Observability & Analysis, 145 projects (Grafana, Icinga, Nagios, Prometheus)

CNCF Cloud Native Networking

It is complex to deploy, integrate, operate and maintain different open source projects that you most probably need to integrate with proprietary software as well. So, one trade-off and disadvantage of open source software could be that it is developed and maintained by a community of volunteers. Some companies need enterprise support.

Note: Do not forget that even though you may be using open source software in different private and public clouds, you cannot change the fact that you most probably still have to use specific services of each cloud platform (e.g., network and storage). In this case, you have a dependency or lock-in on a different architectural layer.

If it is about costs, then open source can be helpful here, sure, but we shouldn’t forget the additional operational efforts. You will never get the costs down to zero with open source

The Reality

Graduated and incubating CNCF projects are considered to be running stable and can be used in production. Some examples would be Envoy, etcd, Harbor, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent, and Prometheus.

Companies and developers have different motivations why open source. Open source software lowers your total cost of ownership (TCO), is created by skillful and talented people, you have more flexibility because of non-proprietary standards, it is cloud agnostic, has strong and fast support from the community when finding bugs, and is considered to be secure for use in production.

Open source is even so much liked that its usage attracts talent. There is no other community of this size that is collaborating on innovation and industry standardization!

But the Apache Log4j vulnerability showed the whole world that open source software needs to become more secure, and that project contributors and users need to ensure the integrity of the source code, build, and distribution in all open source software since a growing number of companies are using open source software as part of their solutions and managed services.

There are certain situations where open source software needs to be integrated with proprietary software. Commercial software can also provide more enterprise-readiness and can provide a complete solution, whereas with open source software on the other hand, you have to deploy and use a combination of different projects (to achieve the same). This could mean a lot of effort for a company. And you have to ensure the interoperability of the implemented software stack.

Technical issues always occur, no matter if it’s open source or proprietary software. Open source software does not provide the enterprise support some organizations are looking for.

While one has to decide what is best for their company and strategy, a lot of people are overwhelmed by the huge and confusing CNCF landscape that gives you so many options. Instead of deploying and integrating different open source projects by themselves, organizations are looking for public cloud service providers that take care of the management and ecosystem (network, storage, databases etc.) related to Kubernetes and this way is seen as the easiest way to get started with cloud native.

What has started for some organizations in one public cloud with one hosted Kubernetes offering has sometimes grown to a landscape with three different public clouds and four different Kubernetes distributions or hosted services.

Example: Companies may have started with Kubernetes or VMware Tanzu on-premises and use AKS, EKS and GKE in their public clouds.

How do you cost-efficiently manage all these different distributions and services over different clouds with different management consoles and security solutions? Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Application Platform could be on option.

VMware and Open Source

VMware and some of their engineers are part of the community and they actively contribute to projects like Kubernetes, Harbor, Carvel, Antrea, Contour and Velero. Interested in some stats (filtered by the last decade)?

Kubernetes – Top 3 Contributors: Google, Red Hat, VMware
Istio – Top 3 Contributors: Google, IBM, Huawei (#7 VMware)
Antrea – Top 3 Contributors: VMware, Amazon, Microsoft
Buildpacks – Top 3 Contributors: Pivotal, Heroku, VMware

Open source is an essential part of any software strategy—from a developer’s laptop to the data center. At VMware, we’re committed to open source and their communities so that we can all deliver better solutions: software that’s more secure, scalable, and innovative. VMware Tanzu is open source aligned and built on a foundation of open source projects.

VMware Tanzu

VMware (Tanzu) leverages some of the leading open source technologies in the Kubernetes ecosystem. They use Cluster API for cluster lifecycle management, Harbor for container registry, Contour for ingress, Fluentbit for logging, Grafana and Prometheus for monitoring, Antrea and Calico for container networking, Velero for backup and recovery, Sonobuoy for conformance testing, and Pinniped for authentication.

VMware Open Source

VMware Tanzu Application Platform

According to VMware, they built Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) with an open source-first mindset. Here are some of the most popular technologies and projects:

More information can be found here.

VMware Data Services

VMware has also a family of on-demand caching, messaging, and database software (from the acquisition of Pivotal):

VMware GemFire – Fast, consistent data for web-scaling concurrent requests fulfills the promise of highly responsive applications.
VMware RabbitMQ – A fast, dependable enterprise message broker provides reliable communication among servers, apps, and devices.
VMware Greenplum – VMware Greenplum is a massively parallel processing database. Greenplum is based on open source Postgres, enabling Data Warehousing, aggregation, AI/ML and extreme query speed.
VMware SQL – VMware’s open-source SQL Database (Postgres & MySQL) is a Relational database service providing cost-efficient and flexible deployments on-demand and at scale. Available on any cloud, anywhere.

Watch the VMware Explore 2022 session “Introduction to VMware Tanzu Data Services” to learn more about this portfolio.

Developers could start with the Tanzu Developer Center.

VMware SQL and DBaaS

If you are interested in building a DB-as-a-Service offering based on PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQL Server, I recommend the following resources from Cormac Hogan:

Closing

Like always, you or your architects have to decide what makes the most sense for your company, your IT landscape, and your applications. Make or buy? Open source or proprietary software? Happy married or locked in? What is vendor lock-in for you?

In any case, VMware embraces open source!

The Backbone To Upgrade Your Multi-Cloud DevOps Experience

Sep 8, 2022 | AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, CNCF, Edge Computing, Kubernetes, Observability, Tanzu, Tanzu Application Platform, VMware Explore, vSphere

Multi-Cloud is a mess. You cannot solve that multi-cloud complexity with a single vendor or one single supercloud (or intercloud), it’s just not possible. But different vendors can help you on your multi-cloud journey to make your and the platform team’s life easier. The whole world talks about DevOps or DevSecOps and then there’s the shift-left approach which puts more responsibility on developers. It seems to me that too many times we forget the “ops” part of DevOps. That is why I would like to highlight the need for Tanzu Mission Control (which is part of Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations) and Tanzu Application Platform.

Challenges for Operations

What has started with a VMware-based cloud in your data centers, has evolved to a very heterogeneous architecture with two or more public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. IT analysts tell us that 75% of businesses are already using two or more public clouds. Businesses choose their public cloud providers based on workload or application characteristics and a public clouds known strengths. Companies want to modernize their current legacy applications in the public clouds, because in most cases a simple rehost or migration (lift & shift) doesn’t bring value or innovation they are aiming for.

A modern application is a collection of microservices, which are light, fault tolerant and small. Microservices can run in containers deployed in a private or public cloud. Many operations and platform teams see cloud-native as going to Kubernetes. But cloud-native is so much more than the provisioning and orchestration of containers with Kubernetes. It’s about collaboration, DevOps, internal processes and supply chains, observability/self-healing, continuous delivery/deployment and cloud infrastructures.

Expectation of Kubernetes

Kubernetes 1.0 was contributed as an open source seed technology by Google to the Linux Foundation in 2015, which formed the sub-foundation “Cloud Native Computing Foundation” (CNCF). Founding CNCF members include companies like Google, Red Hat, Intel, Cisco, IBM and VMware.

Currently, the CNCF has over 167k project contributors, around 800 members and more than 130 certified Kubernetes distributions and platforms. Open source projects and the adoption of cloud native technologies are constantly growing.

If we access the CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape, one will get an understanding how many open source projects are supported by the CNCF and maintained this open source community. Since donated to CNCF, almost every company on this planet is using Kubernetes, or a distribution of it:

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Distro (Amazon EKS-D)
Azure (AKS) Engine
Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service
K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
MetalK8s
Oracle Cloud Native Environment
Rancher Kubernetes
RedHat OpenShift
VMware Tanzu Community Edition
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

These were just a few of total 63 certified Kubernetes distributions. What about the certified hosted Kubernetes service offerings? Let me list here some of the popular ones:

Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Nutanix Karbon
Oracle Container Engine
OVH Managed Kubernetes Service
Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated

All these clouds and vendors expose Kubernetes implementations, but writing software that performs equally well across all clouds seems to be still a myth. At least we have a common denominator, a consistency across all clouds, right? That’s Kubernetes.

Consistent Operations and Experience

It is very interesting to see that the big three hyperscalers Amazon, AWS and Google are moving towards multi-cloud enabled services and products to provide a consistent experience from an operations standpoint, especially for Kubernetes clusters.

Microsoft got Azure Arc now, Google provides Anthos (GKE clusters) for any cloud and AWS also realized that the future consists of multiple clouds and plans to provide AKS “anywhere”.

They all have realized that customers need a centralized management and control plane. Customers are looking for simplified operations and consistent experience when managing multi-cloud K8s clusters.

Tanzu Mission Control (TMC)

Imagine that you have a centralized dashboard with management capabilities, which provide a unified policy engine and allows you to lifecycle all the different K8s clusters you have.

TMC offers built-in security policies and cluster inspection capabilities (CIS benchmarks) so you can apply additional controls on your Kubernetes deployments. Leveraging the open source project Velero, Tanzu Mission Control gives ops teams the capability to very easily backup and restore your clusters and namespaces. Just 4 weeks ago, VMware announced cross-cluster backup and restore capabilities for Tanzu Mission Control, that let Kubernetes-based applications “become” infrastructure and distribution agnostic.

Tanzu Mission Control lets you attach any CNCF-conformant K8s cluster. When attached to TMC, you can manage policies for all Kubernetes distributions such as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), Azure Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine or OpenShift.

Tanzu Mission Control Dashboard

In VMware’s ongoing commitment to support customers in their multi-cloud application modernization efforts, the Tanzu Mission Control team introduced the preview of lifecycle management of Amazon AKS clusters at VMware Explore US 2022:

Preview for lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters can enable direct provisioning and management of Amazon EKS clusters so that developers and operators have less friction and more choices for cluster types. Teams will be able to simplify multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management with centralized lifecycle management of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Amazon EKS cluster types.

Note: With this announcement I would expect that the support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is also coming soon.

Read the Tanzu Mission Control solution brief to get more information about its benefits and capabilities.

Challenges for Developers

Tanzu Mission Control provides cross-cloud services for your Kubernetes clusters deployed in multiple clouds. But there is still another problem.

Developers are being asked to write code and provide business logic that could run on-prem, on AWS, on Azure or any other public cloud. Every cloud provider has an interest to provide you their technologies and services. This includes the hosted Kubernetes offerings (with different Kubernetes distributions), load balancers, storage, databases, APIs, observability, security tools and so many other components. To me, it sounds very painful and difficult to learn and understand the details of every cloud provider.

Cross-cloud services alone don’t solve that problem. Obviously, neither Kubernetes solves that problem.

What if Kubernetes and centralized management and visibility are not “the” solution but rather something that sits on top of Kubernetes?

And Then Came PaaS

Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms and is not really meant to be used by developers.

The CNCF landscape is huge and complex to understand and integrate, so it is just a logical move that companies were looking more for pre-assembled solutions like platform as a service (PaaS). I think that Tanzu Application Service (formerly known as Pivotal Cloud Foundry), Heroku, RedHat OpenShift and AWS Elastic Beanstalk are the most famous examples for PaaS.

The challenge with building applications that run on a PaaS, is sometimes the need to leverage all the PaaS specific components to fully make use of it. What if someone wants to run her own database? What if the PaaS offering restricts programming languages, frameworks, or libraries? Or is it the vendor lock-in which bothers you?

PaaS solutions alone don’t seem to be solving the missing developer experience either for everyone.

Do you want to build the platform by yourself or get something off the shelf? There is a big difference between using a platform and running one. 🙂

Bring Your Own Kubernetes To A Portable PaaS

What’s next after IaaS has evolved to CaaS (because of Kubernetes) and PaaS? It is adPaaS (Application Developer PaaS).

Have you ever heard of the “Golden Path“? Spotify uses this term and Netflix calls it “Paved Road“.

The idea behind the golden path or paved road is that the (internal) platform offers some form of pre-assembled components and supported approach (best practices) that make software development faster and more scalable. Developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel by browsing through a very fragmented ecosystem of developer tooling where the best way to find out how to do things was to ask the community or your colleagues.

VMware announced Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) in September 2021 with the statement, that TAP will provide a better developer experience on any Kubernetes.

VMware Tanzu Application Platform delivers a prepaved path to production and a streamlined, end-to-end developer experience on any Kubernetes.

It is the platform team’s duty to install and configure the opinionated Tanzu Application Platform as an overlay on top of any Kubernetes cluster. They also integrate existing components of Kubernetes such as storage and networking. An opinionated platform provides the structure and abstraction you are looking for: The platform “does” it for you. In other words, TAP is a prescribed architecture and path with the necessary modularity and flexibility to boost developer productivity.

Diagram depicting the layered structure of TAP

The developers can focus on writing code and do not have to fully understand the details like container image registries, image building and scanning, ingress, RBAC, deploying and running the application etc.

Illustration of TAP conceptual value, starting with components that serve the developer and finishing with the components that serve the operations staff and security staff.

TAP comes with many popular best-of-breed open source projects that are improving the DevSecOps experience:

Backstage. Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals, created at Spotify, donated to the CNCF, and maintained by a worldwide community of contributors.
Carvel. Carvel provides a set of reliable, single-purpose, composable tools that aid in your application building, configuration, and deployment to Kubernetes.
Cartographer. Cartographer is a VMware-backed project and is a Supply Chain Choreographer for Kubernetes. It allows App Operators to create secure and pre-approved paths to production by integrating Kubernetes resources with the elements of their existing toolchains (e.g. Jenkins).
Tekton. Tekton is a cloud-native, open source framework for creating CI/CD systems. It allows developers to build, test, and deploy across cloud providers and on-premise systems.
Grype. Grype is a vulnerability scanner for container images and file systems.
Cloud Native Runtimes for VMware Tanzu. Cloud Native Runtimes for Tanzu is a serverless application runtime for Kubernetes that is based on Knative and runs on a single Kubernetes cluster.

At VMware Explore US 2022, VMware announced new capabilities that will be released in Tanzu Application Platform 1.3. The most important added functionalities for me are:

Support for RedHat OpenShift. Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 will be available on RedHat OpenShift, running in vSphere and on baremetal.
Support for air-gapped installations. Support for regulated and disconnected environments, helping to ensure that the components, upgrades, and patches are made available to the system and that they operate consistently and correctly in the controlled environment and keep data secure.
Carbon Black Integration. Tanzu Application Platform expands the ecosystem of supported vulnerability scanners with a beta integration with VMware Carbon Black scanner to enable customer choice and leverage their existing investments in securing their supply chain.

The Power Combo for Multi-Cloud

A mix of different workloads like virtual machines and containers that are hosted in multiple clouds introduce complexity. With the powerful combination of Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Application Platform companies can unlock the full potential of their platform teams and developers by reducing complexity while creating and using abstraction layers on top your multi-cloud infrastructure.