As technology continues to evolve, businesses are increasingly adopting microservices and containerization to improve their IT operations. Managing and maintaining the containers that hold the microservices in a distributed system enables the efficient deployment, scaling, and management of microservices.
The adoption of containerised applications is expected to grow at a reported 16.7% CAGR across globe. Businesses – across industries – are streamlining their focus on developing custom applications based on container technology to differentiate their services. This has evidently created a demand for the container service / management eco system providers to offer a highly scalable, secure infrastructure to deploy, manage and run these modern applications.
Gartner forecasts that “by 2025, more than 85% of the global organizations will be running containerized applications as compared to fewer than 35% from 2019″*.
This shift towards modern applications driven by the AI and ML revolution demands modern infrastructure to support workloads and application delivery that enables developer and DevOps personas to build, run and manage these applications. Kubernetes (K8s) has become the defacto orchestration platform for containers. This brings a huge opportunity for container services as shown in the survey below.
The rapid adoption of modern application has caused an accelerated growth in the container management market over the past years. Gartner reports that “worldwide container management revenue will grow strongly from a small base of $465.8 million in 2020, to reach $944 million in 2024.”**
This demand brings a great opportunity for our service providers to expand their infrastructure as a Service portfolio to Platform as a Service that enables users to build and manage modern applications.
With VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension (CSE), service providers can offer multi tenanted “Kubernetes as a Service” to enable developer tenants that are invested in modern application development with the right infrastructure platform. Powered by Tanzu Kubernetes Grid runtimes, service providers can offer enterprise grade secure Kubernetes as a Service that allows a consistent experience across data centres, public cloud, sovereign cloud, and edge on top of their VMware Cloud Director infrastructure.
Furthermore, supplementing CSE with the Tanzu eco system viz, Tanzu Mission Control – a K8s management console with a single pane of glass view across K8s deployments.
VMware Cloud Director extension for VMware Data Solutions – a multi tenanted data services solution to service the data needs for application building.
Content Hub – a central portal of image repository within the VMware Cloud Director UI that allows users to build, publish and consume custom images / catalogs or use VMware Marketplace catalogs to readily deploy them across their K8s clusters.
In our constant endeavour to empower our partners and users in their modern application journey, we’re glad to announce the general availability of VMware CSE 4.1. as of July 18, 2023. This brings some great enhancements to the previous version with a few new additions.
What’s new?
Robust infrastructure
The platform is now more robust with the introduction of Node health checks, that can continuously monitor the state of the nodes in the cluster. We also have provided Multiple Availability zones to make it more resilient and mitigate failure risks which allows users to distribute their control nodes across a failure domains. These are set up by the provider for the tenants to place their control nodes across the available zones. Read the White paper.
Having resilient support and mitigating risks of downtime is a game changer for mission critical K8s applications. By 2024, nearly 70% of organizations’ new custom-developed applications will be built and managed using microservices and containers as foundations for stronger and higher- performing automation. Customers need modern app environments that are resilient to failure.
Air gapped solution
CSE 4.1 can now function in an air gapped environment that is, without being exposed to the public internet. This can be done by setting up local repositories in the required organizations. See how to set up an air gapped service.
This unlocks the opportunity for our multi-tenant partners to expand their services to offer kubernetes services to business in regulated industries like BFSI, healthcare, aeronautics and also provide platform services to government / public institutions. This opens up huge market opportunities as businesses are now mandating stricter data policies.
Latest Kubernetes version support
It is now possible to use the following Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Kubernetes versions with VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension 4.1 –
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1.1 with Kubernetes 1.22, 1.23, and 1.24.
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.2.0 with Kubernetes 1.23, 1.24, and 1.25.
Along with these additions, there is a minor upgrade in the CSE UI version. See how you can upgrade to the latest version.
The support for latest kubernetes versions enhances security, flexibility and brings in lot many features for the developer personas that facilitate in developing the applications with the latest of innovations in the kubernetes world.
For more information on the release, do check our documentations page and the release notes. You can download the latest version of VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension here. For more information connect with us on our slack channel or write to us if you are not a member already.
References:
*Arun Chandrasekaran, Best Practices for Running Containers and Kubernetes in Production, Gartner, August 2020
**Gartner Press release June 25, 2020
