Back in 2019, VMware made several announcements at VMWorld about their new strategies focused around the modern applications. Their strategies were primarily driven by two VMware offerings: the integration of Kubernetes at the kernel level in vSphere, known as vSphere with Kubernetes, and something called Tanzu.
Since it's announcement much has been said about VMware's modern apps strategy. Yet there's still a lot of confusion about what Tanzu is. In this post, I'm going to discuss about the basics of Tanzu from what I understood while working on it in last few months.
What is Tanzu?
Tanzu is VMware’s platform that includes products and services that allow companies to build, run and manage a kubernetes environment from a single control point. It is a portfolio of products that enable enterprises to modernize both their applications and the infrastructure they run on. It helps users to run and manage multiple kubernetes clusters on-premises(Natively in vSphere with Tanzu) and multi-cloud.
Tanzu adds Kubernetes capabilities to vSphere in ways that respect the current experiences of both developers and vSphere Admins.
To a developer, vSphere with Tanzu looks and acts like a standard Kubernetes cluster. Their tools and processes work across implementations. They can use the Kubernetes “declarative syntax” to define what resources they need, such as storage, networking, and even relationships and availability requirements. By using the industry-standard Kubernetes syntax they don’t need direct access to, or knowledge of, the vSphere APIs, clients, or underlying infrastructure such as networking or storage. Using standard kubectl commands, developers deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters. These are sometimes referred to as TKG clusters and as an acronym, TKC.
To a vSphere Admin, vSphere continues operating just as it has been for years but now with new workload management features to better meet the needs of developers. Management of vSphere is still done through the vSphere Client, PowerCLI, and APIs. vSphere Admins can deploy “namespaces” – the Kubernetes term for managing resources and policies – and manage the security, resource consumption, and networking capabilities available to the developers. vSphere with Tanzu provides a unified approach to infrastructure that is uniquely suited for hosting both traditional workloads, and modern, cloud-native applications.
For application developers, it is Kubernetes. For vSphere administrators, it is vSphere. For the business, it is a consistent, standardized approach for deploying and managing traditional workloads alongside modern, cloud-native applications, while safeguarding the security, compliance, and control of the IT infrastructure.
Why Tanzu?
As we know, many organizations these days are moving toward containerization where it opens the door to several opportunities to help its customers with multiple benefits such as efficiency, portability, speed, scalability, improved security, and agility.
However the challenge with traditional environment is that Developer, the Infrastructure Admin or vSphere admin do not have visibility or control over each other's environments which makes it difficult and moreover it becomes dependency thing during any issue.
Looking from Developer's perspective, they can run Kubernetes pods, and deploy and manage Kubernetes based applications but do not have visibility over the entire stack that is running hundreds of applications.
For a DevOps engineer, they can only have control over the Kubernetes infrastructure, without the tools to manage or monitor the virtual environment and resolve any resource-related issues.
For vSphere Admin, they have full control over the underlying virtual environment, but they do not have visibility over the Kubernetes infrastructure, the placement of the different Kubernetes objects in the virtual environment, and how they consume resources.
This lack of integration between the different layers of the stack introduces many challenges. To overcome this situation, VMware has partnered with many private/public cloud providers to supply infrastructure for their hybrid cloud strategy, upon which Tanzu is built.
vSphere with Tanzu creates a Kubernetes control plane directly on the hypervisor layer which enables the vSphere admin to manage the virtual and kubernetes environment. It helps the vSphere Admin to enable existing vSphere clusters for Workload Management, thus creating a Kubernetes layer within the ESXi hosts that are part of the cluster.
Having Kubernetes running on the hypervisor layer also eases the collaboration between vSphere administrators and DevOps teams, because both roles are working with the same objects. It also enables the following capabilities in vSphere:
For vSphere Administrators -
They can create namespaces on the Supervisor Cluster, called vSphere Namespaces, and configure them with specified amount of memory, CPU, and storage. They can manage and monitor vSphere Pods, VMs, and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters by using the vSphere Client. Also they can have full visibility over vSphere Pods, VMs, and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters.
For DevOps Engineers -
They can create and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters inside a namespace and manage their lifecycle by using the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service. They can run workloads consisting of Kubernetes containers on the same platform with shared resource pools within a vSphere Namespace.
Advantages of Tanzu -
1. It helps in accelerating modern app delivery which in turn increases business agility. This can be achieved by giving developers the tools and resources they need to capitalize on critical app-modernization technologies such as Kubernetes. Organizations can use that speed to better address quickly evolving business requirements and changing priorities.
2. Running Kubernetes everywhere improves decision-making flexibility.
3. Simplifying management helps ensure security, reliability and efficiency. VMware Tanzu enables organizations to centrally manage, govern and better secure all Kubernetes clusters, no matter where they reside.
4. Empowering both development and IT operations teams refocuses everyone on shared goals. VMware Tanzu helps alleviate the tension between the goals of rapid development and stable operations. It transforms the DevOps relationship by giving operations teams what they need to support fast release cycles.
With this, I'll wrap up the post here. In the next post, we will discuss more on the Tanzu architecture, editions and implementations.
I hope you will find this informative.
Thank you for reading!
*** Explore | Share | Grow ***
Comments