VMware Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) is generally available as of June 4, 2021 for our Cloud Provider Partners as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering through the VMware Cloud Partner Navigator. As modern applications adopt container technology worldwide, Tanzu Mission Control unlocks new opportunities for cloud providers to offer Kubernetes (K8s) managed services for a multi-cloud and multi-team environments. TMC can manage multi-tenant K8s clusters created on VMware Cloud Director (VCD) in addition to any CNCF conformant K8s clusters on public clouds as well. This expands the ability of VMware Cloud Provider partners to offer K8s managed services on public clouds.
This is the Tanzu Mission Control Advanced version that is being announced today. See here for the TMC feature comparison details. The TMC Standard version is included in the VMware Tanzu Standard edition and is planned to be available for VMware Cloud Providers soon.
How is VMware helping Cloud Providers attract cloud-native developer workloads?
Cloud Providers can now offer enterprises fully managed and self-service offerings to build and deploy their mission critical cloud-native applications quickly in their VMware Cloud Provider environments: on-prem, hosted private and public clouds. With VMware Tanzu portfolio cloud providers can offer containers and Kubernetes as a service moving beyond IaaS into cloud-native application services. The combination of Bitnami and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes offerings allows cloud providers to expand their multi-cloud services and address the needs of Developers and DevSecOps and attract new workloads, such as Test/Dev environments, onto their clouds. A significant effort is expended by developers in getting all the open-source components in one environment. VCD, Tanzu, and Bitnami make it easier for developers to focus on their innovative applications by providing the most up to date developer tools and simplified container infrastructure in a secure environment. This enables developers to quickly get their prototypes built and have a faster path to deploying them in production environments.
How does Tanzu Mission Control help cloud providers be developer ready?
As Kubernetes adoption grows worldwide, so does fragmentation and silo-ed management of clusters. Isolated distributions involve complexities of manual configuration and processes, inconsistent policies for access, networking and security, lack of cost visibility and control. Tanzu Mission Control is the solution, as a centralized management platform for operating and securing your Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across teams and clouds. Addressing the needs of both developers/DevSecOps and operators, it improves developer productivity by enabling them with self-service access to Kubernetes resources, and brings operational scale, governance, consistency, and efficiency to Kubernetes operations.
Tanzu Mission Control enables multi-cluster Kubernetes management across clouds. Using TMC, customers can provision and manage the lifecycle of Tanzu Kubernetes clusters, and/or attach any conformant clusters from any environment, such as public clouds, for centralized management. With all the clusters under the management of TMC, users can observe through a single pane of glass and automate operational tasks, thereby achieve consistency, improved security and compliance of their Kubernetes infrastructure and applications across clouds.
Cloud providers can help customers by offering TMC-based Applications Infrastructure Management Services in a multi-cloud multi-tenant environment:
- Cluster lifecycle management: Provision, scale, upgrade and delete Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters via Tanzu Mission Control across environments.
- Attaching clusters: Attach any conformant Kubernetes clusters running in other environments—either on-prem or in public clouds—to Tanzu Mission Control for centralized management.
- Centralized policy management: Apply consistent policies, such as access, security, and even custom policies to a fleet of clusters and namespaces at scale.
- Observability and diagnostics: Gain global observability of the health of clusters and workloads across clouds for quick diagnostics and troubleshooting.
- Data protection: Create and schedule backup and restore of your clusters and/or namespaces using Tanzu Mission Control’s UI, CLI, and API, leveraging built-in open source Velero project.
- Identity and access management: Implement centralized authentication and authorization and federated identity from multiple sources, such as AD, LDAP, and SAML.
- Cluster inspection: Conduct cluster inspections, such as cluster conformance Inspection and Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark Inspection, for configuration and security issues.
- Integration with other Tanzu products: Seamlessly consume other Tanzu products by integrating them with Tanzu Mission Control. Get deeper Kubernetes observability and analytics with Tanzu Observability, and get microservices-level connectivity and traffic management with Tanzu Service Mesh.
With TMC now available through the Cloud Partner Navigator (CPN) platform, enabling Kubernetes management is possible via an easy-to-use SaaS portal. Using Cloud Partner Navigator, partners can easily onboard new tenants (developers, and DevSecOps personas) and offer managed services across multi-clouds. TMC empowers a seamless management experience by bringing together multi-cloud, enterprise-readiness, a community-aligned approach and VMware SDDC Integration.
Learning more about Tanzu Mission Control for cloud providers:
Here are the learning and training resources available to you on the overall VMware Tanzu portfolio. The following demo videos are also available to learn about TMC, it’s integration with VCD and availability through CPN:
- TMC on Cloud Partner Navigator
- TMC for Cloud Providers on Partner Connect
- VMware Developer Ready Cloud
- Demo Videos:
- TMC Solution Brief
- TMC FAQ
- TMC Resources (Blogs, Whitepapers, Webinars)
- TMC Product Documentation
Please do not hesitate to reach out to your VMware contacts with any questions.
We are excited about Tanzu Mission Control expanding managed service offerings for our Cloud Provider Partners, and the future innovation possibilities that we can bring to their portfolios. We will continue posting new technical and product information on our VMware Cloud Provider blogs. Join us by following the blog directly using the RSS feed, on Facebook, LinkedIn and on Twitter, and by visiting our YouTube channel too.
As always, thank you, and please stay safe.
