With Kubernetes going mainstream, enterprises are calling out for a cloud management solution to streamline operations. VMware vRealize Cloud Management provides the visibility, insights and control you need to manage VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters.
As Kubernetes becomes mainstream in enterprises, it is essential to operationalize it with a cloud management platform. vRealize Cloud Management makes this possible, with the ability to provision and operate workloads while applying requisite policy and governance. In this blog, I will summarize the capabilities of vRealize Cloud Management for VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters – covering everything from deployment and monitoring to network security and log analysis – to demonstrate how you can support and serve customers of your SDDC who are using Kubernetes.
Customers are excited about vSphere 7 because it provides a VMware-supported implementation of Kubernetes, integrated directly with the platform they already know and trust to run business application workloads. Additionally, it allows developers to interact with the platform using the same tools and DevOps principles they use today. It really is the best of both worlds.
Layer on vRealize Cloud Management and it is a whole new game. The cloud management solution expands visibility to help you improve performance, understand your capacity and manage costs, ensure compliance and security, and enable self-service for Kubernetes workloads.
Deploying TKG clusters
You can easily deploy TKG clusters as a service through vRealize Automation Cloud, as Sam McGeown explains in this blog post. vRealize Automation Cloud not only allows you to automate the deployment of TKG clusters but also manage and deploy Kubernetes resources within those clusters. For example, you can manage namespaces and provide RBAC controls for accessing those namespaces to specific project teams. The documentation for vRealize Automation 8.1 provides Blueprint examples.
There are also event topics provided for Kubernetes cluster tasks to allow for extensibility via Event Broker Subscriptions. Plus, the Code Stream service within vRealize Automation Cloud provides application and infrastructure pipelining capabilities to realize full control over your Kubernetes environments.
Understand capacity and manage costs
Of course, deploying TKG clusters is only half of the story. Having operational visibility into the infrastructure supporting the TKG clusters is critical for troubleshooting issues in the SDDC that could be impacting your Kubernetes environment. It’s possible using vRealize Operations Cloud, as Sunny Dua explains in this blog post.
Capacity planning also needs to be aware of the demands of your Kubernetes environment. vRealize Operations Cloud can help here by intelligently analyzing your usage and demand for effective capacity planning, cost visibility and proactive optimization of your SDDC.
Log analysis
While you are troubleshooting, having log data is critically important to get the full picture of what has transpired. Even better is to have vRealize Log Insight Cloud ingest the logs from the infrastructure as well as the TKG clusters for fast correlation of all events. This way, you get to the root cause quickly. Munishpal Makhija explains how to forward TKG cluster logs to vRealize Log Insight.
Sajal Debnath’s technical whitepaper, Guidebook for Monitoring VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Environment, goes into detail about using vRealize Operations Cloud, vRealize Log Insight Cloud and vRealize Network Insight Cloud to operationalize TKG clusters in your SDDC. You can download a copy here.
There you have it. As the resources in this article demonstrate, operationalizing TKG clusters in your SDDC with the vRealize Cloud Management solution will help you accelerate cloud evolution and give your developers the cloud scale and experience needed to boost productivity and accelerate time to value for Kubernetes implementations in your private cloud.
Want more information?
To learn more about how vRealize Cloud Management helps customers manage modern application platforms for infrastructure automation, consistent operations and governance based on DevOps principles and AI, visit vRealize Suite.
