In the latest episode of the Multi-cloud Podcast, Eric and David sit down with Senior VMware Kubernetes Architects John Harris and Tim Carr. Listen to the experts discuss VMware Tanzu, KubeAcademy, Pivotal and more.
Eric Nielsen and I recently teamed up to launch a new podcast series focused on the needs of cloud architects, cloud operations, and cloud engineers. Each podcast is about 50 minutes long and addresses the needs of teams that are starting to think about how to effectively leverage a multi-cloud environment to support their organization’s application requirements. The first installment of this series is focused on VMware Tanzu Mission Control. You can find the Youtube version here or the audio only version here.
For those unfamiliar with VMware Tanzu, it’s the umbrella name for VMware’s modern application solution portfolio. In Swahilli, Tanzu means “growing branch of a tree”. In Japanese it refers to a modular form of cabinetry. These are good metaphors for how VMware thinks about its modern application solution portfolio and Tanzu represents a fast-growing branch of our larger cloud technologies portfolio.
VMware Tanzu is delivered in a way that allows organizations to adopt container and Kubernetes-related technologies incrementally, in a modular fashion. Tanzu supports scenarios ranging from “we are just getting started with containers” to “we are running Kubernetes in production but are struggling to scale up operations”.
In this podcast we spoke to John Harris and Tim Carr, both Senior VMware Kubernetes Architects with deep expertise on the subject. John and Tim came to VMware through our Heptio acquisition, and Heptio was founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, two of the three people who created Kubernetes at Google. The acquisition of Heptio by VMware brought some of the most talented Kubernetes practitioners in the industry – including John and Tim.
Our discussion mainly focused on understanding the core architecture and the key capabilities of Tanzu Mission Control, which was first introduced as a tech preview at VMworld US in August.
This solution gives organizations the ability to manage Kubernetes clusters regardless of whether they reside on vSphere, PKS, OpenShift, EKG, AKG or just about anything else. It also gives IT operators the ability to provision new Kubernetes clusters and to exercise policy-driven control over things like user access, quotas, and cluster backups.
While we covered Tanzu Mission Control in-depth, we also discussed other container/Kubernetes-related announcements and tech previews that came out of VMworld, including the tech preview of Project Pacific.
Project Pacific is a rearchitecture of vSphere with Kubernetes as its control plane. To a developer, Project Pacific looks like a Kubernetes cluster where they can use Kubernetes declarative syntax to manage cloud resources like virtual machines, disks and networks. To IT admins, Project Pacific looks like vSphere – but with the new ability to manage a whole application instead of just VMs.
Another significant announcement at VMworld US was the launch of KubeAcademy. KubeAcademy is a free, product-agnostic Kubernetes and cloud-native technology education platform. And the last big piece of news we discussed was Pivotal rejoining VMware in the near future. Pivotal brings to VMware a wealth of experience working directly with development teams, helping them rearchitect their approach to application development.
I hope you enjoy this podcast. Eric and I are planning to deliver a new podcast covering an additional multi-cloud, architectural topic, about every three weeks. If you have ideas on topics you would like to see us address in the future or any feedback at all let us know – @ericnipro or @davidj7494.
