VMware Delivers More Tanzu Services for Kubernetes

Source:-containerjournal.com

VMware has moved its effort to embrace Kubernetes forward by making elements of its Tanzu portfolio of services for building, deploying and managing applications in Kubernetes environments more broadly available.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, which provides a service for managing any distribution of Kubernetes, is now generally available along with version 1.7 of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition, formerly known as the VMware Enterprise PKS distribution of Kubernetes.

Version 2.9 of Tanzu Application Service, a runtime environment for Java, .Net and Node applications, is also now generally available along with VMware Cloud Foundations 4.0, which provides the underlying virtual infrastructure required to run an instance of vSphere 7 embedded with Kubernetes.

Finally, the Tanzu Application Service runtime for Kubernetes and the Tanzu Build Service for creating container images are now in beta.

Craig McLuckie, vice president of research and development for VMware, says as a collection of cloud services, Tanzu is designed to meet IT organizations anywhere they are along the path of Kubernetes adoption. It includes tools for building multiple classes of applications along with tools to deploy those applications and manage the Kubernetes clusters they run on. In some cases, those clusters will be running on virtual machines from VMware while in other cases they might be running on virtual machines on a public cloud or even a bare-metal server, he says.

In effect, Tanzu is a “superhighway” through which IT organizations can embrace a variety of next-generation cloud-native technologies in whatever way is most familiar to them, McLuckie says, noting the goal is to make it possible to navigate that transition using a set of services that have been integrated elegantly.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not clear what rate the transition to cloud-native technologies will be made. There is no doubt more application workloads are heading to the cloud where they can be built, deployed and managed flexibly. Less clear is to what degree organizations will prefer to continue to build monolithic applications using tools and platforms they know instead of transitioning to tools and platforms that are optimized specifically for the cloud.

The one thing that is clear is the rate at which management planes have been migrating to the cloud will accelerate as organizations look to unify the management of multiple platforms, says McLuckie. Most organizations today are employing separate management frameworks to manage each cloud and on-premises IT environment. That approach only serves to increase the total cost of IT, which McLuckie notes is unsustainable in its present form given the current economic outlook. Most IT organizations are also leery of becoming locked into a specific cloud service provider, he says.

It is still too early to say with any certainty how the economy will influence IT decisions in the weeks and months ahead. Many organizations are still assessing the damage. Some sectors, such as online entertainment and education, have experienced significant growth. Other sectors are retrenching, which in some cases will mean accelerating nascent digital business transformation initiative. Whatever the outcome, IT—much like the economy—is about to change utterly.