In our previous blog, we talked about how an organization admin leveraging VMware Cloud Foundation Automation enables their organization to be effectively ready for application teams to self-serve and provision infrastructure and applications.
In this blog, we are going to shed light on two foundational infrastructure services that are enabled and available out of the box when configuring the tenant organization that leverages the K8S Style API: the Virtual Machine Service and the vSphere Kubernetes Service.
The Kubernetes declarative API model has already transformed the way organizations build and operate modern applications. But in recent years, the same Kubernetes model has been extended beyond containerized workloads into the world of infrastructure itself.
What started with kubectl apply for Pods and Deployments has evolved into using Kubernetes APIs to provision and manage virtual machines, K8S clusters, networking, storage, load balancers, and even databases. Kubernetes is no longer “just the platform for cloud-native apps.” It’s steadily becoming the universal control plane for both applications and infrastructure.
Virtual Machine Service
The Virtual Machine (VM) Service in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 provides a unified, Kubernetes-native interface for provisioning and managing VMs directly through namespaces. By exposing VM classes, images, storage policies, and networking configurations as declarative Kubernetes resources, the VM Service enables platform and application teams to consume vSphere-backed compute using familiar Kubernetes tooling. This service ensures consistent governance and lifecycle management by enforcing the policies defined at the organization, region, and project levels in VCF Automation, while leveraging vSphere’s mature virtualization capabilities underneath.
Below is a detailed walkthrough of the VM provisioning workflow experience in VMware Cloud Foundation Automation.
vSphere Kubernetes Service
The vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 delivers a fully integrated, upstream-compatible Kubernetes control plane that runs natively on vSphere. Through VKS, organizations can create and operate Kubernetes clusters as first-class cloud resources with consistent networking, storage, identity, and security enforced by the underlying VCF platform. The service provides lifecycle automation, conformance, and governance across clusters, enabling teams to deploy applications reliably using standard Kubernetes APIs while inheriting the enterprise resiliency, scalability, and infrastructure automation built into VMware Cloud Foundation.
Below is a detailed walkthrough of the vSphere Kubernetes Cluster provisioning workflow experience in VMware Cloud Foundation Automation.
Summary
VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 brings VM Service and VKS together as core pillars of a unified, modern infrastructure platform. VM Service enables developers to consume vSphere-backed VMs via Kubernetes-native APIs, while Kubernetes Services provides a fully integrated, conformant Kubernetes environment for running containerized workloads.
Together, these services give organizations the flexibility to support both traditional and cloud-native applications with consistent governance, automation, and security.
Ready to get started with VCF Automation and enable IT to deliver a self-service private cloud for application teams to build, run, and manage AI, Kubernetes, and VM-based applications?
Visit us online at VMware Cloud Foundation Automation for additional resources.
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