Recently at VMworld 2019 US, we announced a tech preview* of VMware Tanzu Mission Control, a way to bring consistency and control to all your Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they are running. The Kubernetes Architecture team at VMware focuses on getting customers into production with Kubernetes, and VMware Tanzu Mission Control is a much-needed tool to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters. While Kubernetes itself tends to treat the namespace as a logical boundary between groups of resources, many customers opt instead to treat entire clusters as isolation mechanisms between workloads and have asked VMware for a way to manage the many clusters they deploy.
To take it further, different workloads have different needs, which means large organizations could have a myriad of different infrastructure: public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal. Enterprises could have an even more granular choice in each type of infrastructure: bare metal with SSDs, cloud driven by spot instances, and on and on. This is why we’re so excited about VMware Tanzu Mission Control: It will provide a tool to manage your Kubernetes clusters across this matrix of infrastructure. So, of all the features, which are we most excited about?
Centralized Kubernetes Lifecycle Management
With just a few clicks, VMware Tanzu Mission Control will provide a clean way to manage the lifecycle of cloud-hosted Kubernetes clusters. If enterprises are running any flavor of upstream-conformant Kubernetes on bare metal or VMware vSphere in the data center or have managed Kubernetes services in the public cloud, they will be able to bring those clusters under centralized management with VMware Tanzu Mission Control.
Unified Access Management
Companies working with multiple clusters have to track which teams have access to which clusters. Although Active Directory groups can make access management a bit easier, most companies we’ve worked with that deploy many clusters have to get creative around cluster-access management. With VMware Tanzu Mission Control, platform operations teams will be able to manage access to all their Kubernetes clusters in one place.
Security and Configuration Management
If authentication and authorization are problems at scale, security policies and network policies with multiple clusters are also problems. VMware Tanzu Mission Control will allow platform operators to manage cluster policies at a macrolevel by grouping many Kubernetes clusters together in workspaces divided by application team, the stages of software application development, or other ways that make sense to an organization. After the clusters are grouped, you will be able to apply security policies and configuration policies to all those clusters at once.
Backup and Restores with Velero
Velero allows operators to back up important data from Kubernetes clusters, including the underlying volumes. Through VMware Tanzu Mission Control, platform operators will be able to back up multiple important clusters at once as dictated by policy.
With the introduction of VMware Tanzu as a portfolio of products and services, we are transforming the way enterprises build software on Kubernetes. As organizations increase self-service and developer velocity through multiple Kubernetes clusters, VMware Tanzu Mission Control will offer a powerful set of capabilities that will allow platform operators to manage modern API-driven infrastructures.
To find out more about VMware Tanzu Mission Control, check out the web page or watch this video. Keen on getting an exclusive first look at the tech preview of VMware Tanzu Mission Control? Then sign up to request a demo.
*There is no commitment or obligation that technical preview features will become generally available.
