VMware Cloud Foundation(VCF) v4 is an engineered solution with VMware products to simplify path to hybrid cloud while increasing productivity and reduce TCO. VCF delivers a new level of consistency in infrastructure and operations across hybrid clouds together with vSAN 7, NSX-T and vRealize Suite 2019, Tanzu Portfolio and vSphere 7 with Kubernetes. Benefits of VMware Cloud Foundation is a huge topic by itself and this blog only focuses on the DevOps process transformation with VCF as VMware enables unify application development and IT operations across multiple platforms in a truly meaningful DevOps way.
1.1 Enablers for the DevOps process
DevOps is a principal allowing operations, security, development to work in parallel. Organizations are embracing DevOps to support the rapidly growing business needs. The key tool for the operations team is Infrastructure automation and management. Infrastructure is treated the same way that any other code, thus empowering ops person provision hundreds of machines simultaneously. With the increasing needs for an agile infrastructure, development teams are also aiming at leveraging the elasticity of the public cloud platforms. Developers are adopting microservices pattern that make it easy to develop, test and deploy applications. Each microservice is packaged as one or more container, which can be quickly and easily deployed on any environment with consistent results. Orchestrators tool like Kubernetes enable development and ops team to manage large groups of containers.
So in summary, the key enablers of the DevOps process transformation is infrastructure automation and running modern infrastructure for modern application consistently across any environment, from the data center to the cloud and the edge. VCF transforms Dev and Ops together with the common goal of quick release cycles and superior app availability by providing an agile application platform.
1.2 Whats in VMware Cloud Foundation for DevOps Teams
1.2.1 Infrastructure Automation and Management
VMware Cloud Foundation integrates deeply with vRealize suite to include the cloud management capabilities. Cloud Foundation automates the configuration and deployment of cloud management applications such as vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation providing the below benefits –
- Automated Deployment: Cloud Foundation automates the deployment of the full infrastructure stack, including compute, storage, network, and management. This level of automation enables quick, repeatable deployments while reducing the operational cost of engineering the environment with an in-house skillset and reducing the inherent risk of manual misconfigurations.
- Self Service Provisioning and Governance: Cloud Foundation enables IT to deliver a self-service hybrid cloud with automation and governance. The cloud automation capabilities enable the cloud administrator to on-board tenants, implement policy-based governance and access control over underlying cloud infrastructure resources, and automate the delivery and lifecycle of cloud environments and developer services. This enables authorized users, such as other IT teams, developers, SREs, and DevOps teams, to use service catalog to directly request resources, speeding up infrastructure and application service delivery.
- Manage Everything with Code – Everything can be defined as code including policies and blueprints, through YAML, GIT integration and an API first approach.
- Lifecycle Management: Cloud Foundation provides built-in lifecycle management that automates day 0 to day 2 software platform operations, such as configuration and provisioning of infrastructure resources and patching/upgrading of the software stack.
- Self-driving Operations: Cloud Foundation includes self-driving operations delivering continuous performance optimization based on operational and business intent, efficient capacity and cost management, proactive cloud planning, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance management.
- Log aggregation and analytics – vRealize Log Insight, also part of Cloud Foundation, provides centralized log aggregation as well as capabilities for log searching and root cause analysis.
1.2.1.1 CI/CD as a service with vRealize Code Stream
VMware Code Stream automates the code and application release process with a comprehensive set of capabilities for app deployment, testing and troubleshooting. The service integrates with popular developer tools and supports VMware-based private clouds, VMware Cloud on AWS and native public clouds. The new cloud service includes many pre-built Continuous Integration plug-ins for development tools (e.g. Git, Jenkins), Cloud (AWS) and orchestration systems (e.g. Kubernetes, VKE, PKS). Whereas Cloud Assembly automates infrastructure or application deployments, Code Stream improves productivity by automating the deployments though various stages until production.
1.2.2 Modern Infrastructure for Modern Applications
Organizations are aiming to modernize applications and operations for faster and secure delivery of new features to customers. These efforts are leading to wide use of containers and Kubernetes to ease the complexity of scaling distributed applications. VMware Cloud Foundation enables transitioning from VM-Centric Infrastructure to Application-Centric Infrastructure by building on VMware vSphere 7 and Tanzu to present IT teams with either a traditional graphical user interface to manage Kubernetes and VMware vSphere 7 or a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and command-line interfaces (CLIs) that can be invoked by a DevOps team
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is an easy to upgrade Kubernetes runtime providing consistent infrastructure for modern applications across your data center, public cloud and edge to offer a unified experience for all development teams. IT operators can now provision Kubernetes clusters just as easily as they provision virtual machines and avoid the burden of Day 1 and Day 2 kubernetes operations. Developers are able to access Kubernetes clusters through the native Kubernetes APIs.
- Tanzu Mission Control provides a unified management plane simplifying the management of Kubernetes at scale. It acts as a governance control point, providing a self service access to Kubernetes clusters across multiple cloud providing consistency across deployment, configuration and security.
- Tanzu Application Catalog, powered by Bitnami, is a customizable selection of production-ready open source softwares. Developer productivity increases with on-demand, self-service application components ensuring security and transparency of application delivery.
- Tanzu observability by WaveFront is the cherry on the cake providing Dev and Ops with visibility into full stack i.e the performance of applications and the infrastructure on which they run. It provides metrics-driven analytics at a massive scale, enabling developers and operators to improve code running in production across multiple clouds.
1.3 Getting Started
To learn more about VMware Cloud Foundation 4, visit the VMware Cloud Foundation page or the VCF Resource center.
