Technical

Modern Applications on VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

The 2024 Cloud Native Survey by the Linux Foundation reveals compelling trends: Kubernetes adoption is soaring, with 93% of companies either using it in production, piloting it, or actively evaluating it, solidifying its role as a foundational technology. Cloud native principles have reached a new milestone, embraced by 89% of organizations, encompassing practices like microservices, DevOps, CI/CD automation, and container orchestration. Furthermore, 91% of organizations now use containers in production, signaling their transition from a niche technology to a standard component of enterprise IT strategy. These statistics collectively underscore the widespread adoption and mainstream integration of cloud native and Kubernetes technologies in modern application development. 

While modern applications offer compelling benefits like faster innovation and scalability, organizations face significant challenges in their adoption. These include navigating infrastructure complexity and silos across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, addressing technology complexity and skill gaps in rapidly evolving areas like Kubernetes and DevOps, ensuring security and compliance in distributed and fast-paced release cycles, managing tool sprawl that leads to redundant and poorly integrated solutions, and overcoming the hurdles of integrating with existing legacy systems. 

Managing modern apps

With VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, the vSphere Supervisor offers a robust foundation for managing both modern and traditional workloads. It enables unified management of VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and other resources through a single, consistent API, simplifying operations and reducing the need for separate platforms.

Beyond this, the vSphere Supervisor provides an extensible ecosystem via Services, allowing on-demand enhancement of platform capabilities. This means new functionality can be added as needed while maintaining a consistent consumption experience.

Crucially, it abstracts the complexity of the underlying infrastructure, empowering teams to focus on application delivery rather than infrastructure management. This approach to modern workload management is flexible, scalable, and designed to evolve with your growing needs.

The vSphere Supervisor simplifies the management of VMs and Kubernetes clusters by providing a unified, consistent API for both. This allows for:

  • Unified management – A single API manages VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and other resources, eliminating the need for separate platforms.
  • Declarative API – Users define the desired state, and the system automatically configures and maintains it.
  • Extensible ecosystem – Private cloud services offer additional functionality on demand while maintaining a consistent user experience.
  • Infrastructure abstraction – It abstracts the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, allowing teams to focus on application delivery.
  • Self-service for catalog – Consumers can deploy VMs and Kubernetes clusters on-demand through a self-service model with VCF Automation. 
  • Integrated services – Core services like vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) for clusters and VM Service for VMs are included.
  • Consistent lifecycle – Building-block services have independent lifecycles, enabling flexible deployment and updates without affecting the entire environment.
  • Workload isolation – vSphere Namespaces provide logical units for resource and network isolation.

Monitoring modern apps

VCF Operations 9.0 introduces a significant enhancement through its native integration with Supervisor. This integration empowers customers with the capability to automatically discover critical Kubernetes components of Supervisor and other associated Kubernetes clusters. This streamlined discovery process simplifies the management and monitoring of containerized environments within the VCF ecosystem.

By installing a Telegraf Agent into each of the VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) clusters, customers can achieve comprehensive, end-to-end visibility into the performance and health of their applications. This agent facilitates the collection of vital metrics and logs, providing a holistic view from the infrastructure layer all the way up to the application layer. This detailed insight is crucial for proactive problem identification, performance optimization, and ensuring the smooth operation of modern, microservices-based applications deployed within the VCF environment. The combination of automatic discovery and deep-dive visibility positions VCF Operations 9 as a powerful tool for managing complex Kubernetes deployments.

Running modern apps

As our VKS platform continues to evolve, we are committed to continually refreshing and updating our comprehensive library of publicly available reference architectures. These architectures serve as critical demonstrations of our ability to run a diverse array of modern workloads directly on VKS and VCF.

The workloads include, but are not limited to, computationally intensive applications such as AI and ML initiatives, high-performance modern databases designed for complex data management, and a full suite of cutting-edge DevOps tools essential for streamlined software development and deployment. Each reference architecture is designed to provide clear, actionable guidance to help ensure optimal performance, scalability, and reliability for these demanding modern applications within the VKS and VCF environment.

The following resources are available to help your adoption of VCF 9.0 for modern applications.

From workload isolation that ensures performance and availability to intuitive self-service catalogs that deliver rapid application deployment, VCF 9.0 is engineered to meet the demands of modern enterprise environments. Download and deploy it today. 

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