In part 1 of the blog series we looked at the challenges faced by organization leveraging Kubernetes across multi-cloud environments and looked at some of the components of the VMware Tanzu portfolio. In this part 2 of the blog series, we will look at the components of the Multi-Cloud solution and their deployment.
Tanzu Mission Control:
Tanzu Mission Control, now available through VMware Cloud Partner Navigator, is a centralized management platform for consistently operating and securing your Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across multiple teams and clouds.
Figure 11: VMware Tanzu Mission Control offers a centralized Kubernetes management platform
Tanzu Mission Control 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 infrastructure and platform teams use Tanzu Mission Control to enable developers with self-service access to Kubernetes. It also allows them to centrally operate and manage the Kubernetes clusters and modern apps running on them with efficiency, consistency, and security. 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 their applications and quickly troubleshooting issues.
Provider and Customer Challenges
There are a variety of Kubernetes distributions out there. Managing access, policy, security and cost across isolated distributions can be a challenge. Tanzu Mission Control provides a centralized management platform, giving managed service providers and their users the independence, they need to drive business forward, while enabling consistent management and operations across environments at scale.
Figure 12: Tanzu Mission provides consistent operations across clouds
The Problem:
It is hard to consistently connect, control, monitor, and remediate cloud native apps. Moderns App are running in multiple platforms and clouds. There are multiple endpoints to monitor, scale, and make them resilient. Operational and remediation policies differ across clouds. Security, auditing and compliance are disoriented
Solution Components:
TKG allows use of existing data center tools and workflows to give developers secure, self-serve access to conformant Kubernetes clusters in their VMware private cloud and extend the same consistent Kubernetes runtime across their public cloud and edge environments. TKG can enable consistent Kubernetes everywhere with automated multi-cluster operations, validated integrated services and enterprise-wide management.
VMware Tanzu Mission Control gives teams self service capabilities to spin up their own Kubernetes clusters, while keeping track of all of their services using workspaces. Workspaces work across clusters provides teams the flexibility they need to run their services, while conforming to organizational policies. Workspaces also allows operations teams to assign policy in a hierarchical way at the global, cluster, and workspace level.
Tanzu Service mesh provides the ability to run applications across multi-cloud environments. It ensures application high availability and resiliency to deliver on application SLAs and ensure a positive experience for application users, while protecting sensitive data and ensuring compliance. It enables operational Control to deliver consistent and intelligent operations across cloud environments.
This solution seeks to combine the capabilities of TKG, Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Service Mesh to host an end to end secure and optimized multi-cloud application. Kubernetes is deployed distinct multi-cloud locations that include VMC on AWS and VMC on Dell EMC.
The Solution:
This solution show cases a multi-cloud deployment of a distributed application leveraging Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. The multi cloud TKG solution is deployed in a distributed fashion across two different cloud environments that includes a VMC on AWS SDDC in Oregon and VMC on Dell EMC SDDC in Santa Clara. Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu service mesh described below are used to operationalize, secure and manage the environment.
Solution Architecture:
Figure 13: Logical schematic of solution showing all components
The logical schematic of the solution is shown. TKG is deployed independently in two distinct multicloud locations that include a VMC on AWS SDDC and a VMC on Dell EMC Edge location. Tanzu Mission Control is used to manage these TKG clusters in a centralized manner as shown. Tanzu Service mesh is used to create a global namespace and provides for monitoring, automation, policy management and secure communications across the multi-cloud infrastructure. An example e-commerce application was deployed across the multicloud environment to showcase the capabilities of the solution.
Solution Configuration:
VMware Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) is used to centrally manage Kubernetes clusters. The two Kubernetes clusters, one running in VMC on AWS and the other in VMC in Dell EMC are shown in the TMC console.
Figure 14: Tanzu Mission Control console showing the two managed clusters in the solution
VMware Tanzu Mission Control provides insight into all aspects of the Kubernetes clusters it manages. It provides a graphical view of all the health metrics, the nodes, namespaces and workloads.
Figure 15: VMC on AWS TKG Cluster overview in TMC
The VMC on Dell EMC Kubernetes cluster is shown below. The master node is identified as the control plane and the four worker nodes are shown below that.
Figure 16: VMC on Dell EMC TKG Cluster nodes as seen in TMC
Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM) console is shown with all its components. The sample global namespace used by the multi-cloud web application is shown.
Figure 17: Global Namespace for solution in Tanzu Service Mesh
In part 3 of the blog series, we will look at deployment of the application and the workings of the solution.
