VMware Application Catalog now offers enterprise support for Kubeapps, allowing customers to consume production-ready open source artifacts easily and efficiently!
The ever-increasing adoption of open source software (OSS) by enterprises has led to a disconnect of sorts between the platform engineering and development teams. As developers seek restriction-free enjoyment of the wide range of benefits offered by the OSS ecosystem, platform engineering teams are struggling to establish strong control or visibility over what is being consumed by their developers. VMware Application Catalog aims to solve this problem by striking the right balance between developer convenience and platform engineering confidence.
VMware Application Catalog allows platform engineers to deliver a curated catalog of ready-to-use, production-grade OSS images to their developers. This helps platform engineering teams avoid going through the tedious packaging and maintenance tasks typically involved in OSS usage, while acting as the single source of all OSS needs for developers.
The benefits of Kubeapps with VMware Application Catalog
Kubeapps is one of the open source projects of the VMware Bitnami team, and is among the 100+ pre-packaged open source images present in VMware Application Catalog. It is an in-cluster, web-based application that enables platform engineers and developers to easily deploy, manage, and upgrade applications on a Kubernetes cluster through an intuitive GUI. Today we are happy to announce that customers of VMware Application Catalog now have enterprise support for Kubeapps from VMware.
Kubeapps expands the potential of VMware Application Catalog by enabling the customers to consume the open source images in a seamless and efficient fashion. Some of the key value adds offered by Kubeapps to VMware Application Catalog users are listed below:
Simplified deployment and management of applications
When used with VMware Application Catalog, the web-based intuitive dashboard provided by Kubeapps to deploy, manage, and upgrade applications on a Kubernetes cluster can make developers’ lives much easier. Developers can easily discover and consume OSS applications from a single intuitive UI instead of scanning through multiple container registries' documentation and using a command line interface to search through Helm charts.
Easier implementation of role-based access control (RBAC)
Kubeapps can use the existing RBAC configuration of a Kubernetes cluster, allowing platform operators and cluster admins to extend their standard access control policies and retain control of who can access what, when, how, and from where. Kubeapps can thus be used as the central hub for managing all application deployments on Kubernetes with total confidence, making its pairing with VMware Application Catalog even more desirable for enterprise development teams.
Extend usage to any private Helm repository
Kubeapps can also be configured to use a private application repository as its source. This feature gives customers the option of extending their catalog with their charts located in a private Helm repository (e.g., ChartMuseum or Harbor), and even allows them to use their customized Helm chart catalog directly from the VMware Application Catalog.
Additionally, Kubeapps can be configured to automatically replicate Helm charts from the VMware Application Catalog. By doing so, users can benefit from a browser-based user interface to customize, upgrade, and rollback their deployments using the latest, most secure, and up-to-date Helm charts from the VMware Application Catalog.
Next steps
By getting enterprise support for Kubeapps with VMware Application Catalog, we believe our customers are well-positioned to explore and enjoy the full potential of VMware Application Catalog. If you would like to learn how to create and configure an application repository for VMware Application Catalog in Kubeapps, or how to deploy a Helm chart from VMware Application Catalog through Kubeapps, please read through our documentation.
If you are interested in learning more about VMware Application Catalog through a live demo, please fill out this form and one of our experts will reach out to you!
