VMware Cloud Provider

Developer Ready Clouds for VMware Cloud Provider Partners: Announcing GA of Tanzu Standard Edition

VMware Tanzu Standard edition is generally available as of November 25, 2021 for VMware Cloud Provider partners. With the rapid global growth in cloud-native developer and DevSecOps/Developers’ needs for simplified and on-demand container infrastructure in multi-cloud environments, enterprises are looking to cloud providers for Kubernetes managed service offerings that span multi-clouds. Tanzu Standard, integrated with VMware Cloud Director is the solution that enables cloud providers to offer multi-tenant managed Kubernetes as-a-Service (KaaS) in multi-cloud environments. By going beyond the vSphere on-premise offering of Tanzu Basic edition and combining features in Tanzu Mission Control for MSP, both announced earlier this year, Tanzu Standard for Cloud Providers takes our Developer Ready Cloud vision to the next stage, by enabling managed services for creating Kubernetes (K8s) clusters as well as managing CNCF conformant K8s clusters across clouds.

With Tanzu Standard on VCD, cloud providers have a choice of enabling Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, the Kubernetes distribution from VMware, as an integrated service on vSphere, or deploying it across multiple public clouds. They also have the capability attach and centrally manage any CNCF conformant K8s clusters deployed on other clouds, just as with Tanzu Mission Control.

What K8s managed services can cloud providers offer using Tanzu Standard?

Tanzu Standard edition features are now supported through VMware Cloud Director 10.2, for multi-tenant, multi-cloud and multi-team environments. This following K8s managed services are possible:

  • Services for K8s Cluster Creation:
    • Creation of K8s clusters
    • VMware Storage service for developer environment
    • Content library of Kubernetes versions
    • Full-stack network service on K8s cluster and load-balancing (NSX ALB Basic), NAT capability etc.
    • Antrea Container Networking Interface (CNI) plug-in (default)
    • Lifecycle management services using Cluster API
  • Services for K8s Cluster Operation:
    • Attach and manage CNCF conformant K8s clusters
    • Centralized access and Policy Management​
    • vSphere Pod Service
    • Image Registry service through Harbor for version management on container environment​
    • Cluster and Workload Health Observability using Fluent Bit. Prometheus and Grafana support for platform monitoring.​
    • Management using vCenter​
    • Backup and Restore clusters and namespaces; Backup scheduling​
    • System and event audits, cluster conformance inspection
    • Download and install opensource aligned packages for observability using Fluent Bit and image registry using Harbor and Calico CNI plug-in.

How to deploy Tanzu Standard for multi-tenancy and multi-cloud experience?

While Tanzu Basic with VMware Cloud Director (VCD) enhanced multi-tenancy for vSphere 6.7u3+ environments, Tanzu Standard extends the creation of K8s clusters using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid runtime to other clouds.

Once the clusters are created with Tanzu Standard using VCD or on vSphere, Tanzu Mission Control can attach to these clusters or to other CNCF conformant K8s clusters, and enable the cloud provider to offer additional self-service access to these clusters, bringing operational scale, governance, consistency, and efficiency to Kubernetes operations.

How does Tanzu Standard enhance cloud providers’ Developer Ready offering?

In addition to the Developer Ready Cloud benefits already outlined with the announcement of Tanzu Basic and Tanzu Mission Control, in terms of creating and managing K8s clusters and improving developer velocity with Bitnami, cloud providers can now extend it to multi-cloud DevOps/Developer experience. 

Further, Tanzu Standard brings additional monitoring and observability features based on open-source aligned components, back-up and restore capabilities, and auditing and compliance features that truly enhance cloud-native application development and workloads on multi-cloud. With the Tanzu Standard edition and VCD support, cloud providers can be future-ready for more services enabled by Tanzu Advanced edition and other products in the Tanzu portfolio.

How can cloud providers license and order Tanzu Standard edition?

Tanzu Standard for cloud providers is available as consumption model with a term license and requires a Cloud Provider Term contract. Please work with your Aggregator to sign up for a Term contract required for licensing Tanzu Standard.  Once cloud providers sign a single Term License Subscription Software (TLSS) contract that covers all term license subscription products (non-SaaS) from VMware. Tanzu Standard can be ordered through the one-off-order process on VMware Commerce Portal. Tanzu Standard for Cloud Providers is available as a Flex Core add-on (pricing based on vRAM metric).

Learning more about Tanzu Standard edition cloud providers

Here are the additional learning and training resources available to you on Tanzu Standard edition and the overall VMware Tanzu portfolio:

Tanzu Standard Edition Resources:

Please reach out to your VMware contacts with any questions.

We are excited about Tanzu Standard adding K8s 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.

Satish Katpally

Satish is a technologist with an entrepreneurial soul. He is a patent holder with technical and business experience in IoT, data analytics, data center, enterprise infrastructure, SDN, SD-WAN, containers, and…

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