As more customers start to see the benefits of Kubernetes in orchestrating their containerized applications, VMware Tanzu Mission Control continues to evolve with new features that meet operational challenges.
With the addition of Terraform provider support, Tanzu Mission Control enables increased DevOps velocity by offering an additional route to consistent deployments and management of Kubernetes.
Customers can now take advantage of Terraform to define their infrastructure as code as well as resources supported by the Tanzu Mission Control API in a declarative format and automate their DevOps pipelines.
Why Terraform provider with Tanzu Mission Control?
Terraform provider with Tanzu Mission Control gives operations teams the ability to be infrastructure agnostic and build a code pipeline that accommodates a variety of infrastructure back ends (e.g., multi-cloud, private cloud, networking and database solutions, and more).
We hear from customers about the growing demands within their organizations to “get on Kubernetes” or who are wondering how to manage their Kubernetes footprints deployed on private, public, and hybrid clouds.
The Tanzu Mission Control Terraform provider supports attachment of any Cloud Native Computing Foundation–conformant cluster spanning a range of public cloud providers as well as private clusters. This allows our customers to harness the power of hybrid or multi-cloud Kubernetes management and bring all capabilities of Tanzu Mission Control to these cloud environments in a first-class, native way.
With the infrastructure-agnostic approach of Terraform, Tanzu Mission Control can be utilized to unlock the power of simple, easy-to-define resource declarations for all Tanzu Mission Control–available APIs. These resource declarations can then be versioned in source code versioning systems, and all changes can be tracked and managed consistently. For example, you can define a set of cluster groups and workspaces in a configuration file, then you can configure the clusters, namespaces, and nodepools to reside in the cluster groups or workspaces from the prior step.
Customers can also ensure all their Kubernetes infrastructure is in the intended state as declared by the Terraform scripts and easily reconcile this state in case of any drifts.
You can attach any conformant Kubernetes cluster to Tanzu Mission Control through Terraform.
This allows Tanzu Mission Control to be integrated even further into existing automation pipelines, significantly increasing the efficiency and control of operations teams responsible for Kubernetes clusters while providing developers the flexibility to deploy their applications to preconfigured environments.
For more information on cluster groups and workspaces, refer to the documentation on creating a cluster group and managing namespaces.
Benefits for both operations and development teams
While the new Terraform provider for Tanzu Mission Control can be used for a variety of use cases, here are a few of its important benefits:
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Self-service for operations and development teams – Operations teams can pick up existing configuration files and create hassle-free repeatable environments from scratch that can be easily managed. Developers can leverage these environments and self-service all the necessary tooling for building their applications. This also allows for creation of identical development, staging, and production environments when needed using the exact same declaration.
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Improved team collaboration and development velocity – As all changes are tracked, teams can avoid unnecessary configuration conflicts while multiple teams share configuration files. This avoids any manual error scenarios, helping teams ship their applications to production faster.
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Automated multi-cloud and hybrid deployments – The Terraform provider eliminates the ticket-driven approach for deploying both infrastructure and applications and works in a similar fashion irrespective of the underlying private data center or public cloud. This allows DevOps teams to use the same syntax and toolchain and eliminate the need to learn multiple technologies.
This initial release of Tanzu Mission Control Terraform Provider brings support for VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere as well as the ability to attach any conformant Kubernetes cluster, including public cloud provider clusters. View further documentation and guides on Terraform provider for Tanzu Mission Control.
Terraform provider is available for current Tanzu Mission Control customers to try through GitHub.
