Application architectures are evolving. That shouldn’t be news to anyone. Today, emerging app architectures that leverage container-based workloads and microservices are becoming mainstream, moving from science projects in development labs to enterprise production deployments at scale. The benefits are clear. Developers and the application lifecycle, become faster, more productive, more agile, and more responsive to the needs of the business.

 

 

Today we’re announcing NSX-T 2.1, which will enable advanced networking and security across these emerging app architectures, just as it does for traditional 3-tier apps. More specifically, NSX-T 2.1 will serve as the networking and security platform for the recently announced VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS), a Kubernetes solution jointly developed by VMware and Pivotal in collaboration with Google. NSX-T 2.1 will also introduce integration with the latest 2.0 release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), serving as the networking and security engine behind PCF. In these environments, NSX-T will provide Layer 3 container networking and advanced networking services such as load balancing, micro-segmentation, and more.

For development teams, these integrations mean that they will be able to operate quickly and consume infrastructure as code. Meanwhile, their workflows will remain the same — fast and efficient — because NSX-T will integrate tightly with these application platforms, connecting directly into the Container Networking Interface (CNI), fitting into the existing application development tools that developers are already using. The result is that as developers are deploying code, advanced networking and security services will automatically be provisioned to support their containers and microservices, creating a truly full stack developer cloud.

In parallel, IT teams still need operational control of and visibility into the broader heterogeneous environments that they manage, whether they be on-premises or in the public cloud. NSX-T will provide a common management interface for containers and microservice architecture applications, as well as traditional VM-based ones across all environments, allowing IT teams the oversight they need without inhibiting the ability of developers to quickly develop, deploy, and iterate on their applications.

 


We recognize that in this new world, endpoints are heterogeneous and infrastructure consumption models are changing. To that end, we specifically designed and optimized NSX-T to enable organizations across all industries to hit the gas on their ongoing digital transformation journeys. NSX-T 2.1 is the next step in this drive for VMware, and we invite you to join us for the ride!

NSX-T 2.1 will be generally available in Q4 of VMware’s FY’18. Also, make sure you subscribe to this blog and keep an eye out for the technical details of the new PKS and PCF 2.0 support with NSX-T 2.1, which will be coming in the next few weeks.

Head over to the PKS blog and PCF 2.0 blog to get a more in-depth discussion of each solution.