Senior Product Marketing Manager Susan Wu co-authored this post.
With the acceleration of digitalization, enterprises across all verticals are running more and more distributed applications deployed on multiple clouds. This poses a new set of challenges when it comes to maintaining, updating, and securing these distributed applications. Our customers are looking for solutions to connect and secure their applications for rapid delivery with minimal disruptions and code changes.
Today, we are excited to announce the integration of VMware Tanzu Service Mesh and VMware Tanzu Mission Control, two key products in the VMware Tanzu portfolio with a focus on managing and securing distributed modern applications running on Kubernetes across disparate environments.
Manage Kubernetes infrastructure and apps across clusters and environments
Tanzu Mission Control, a centralized Kubernetes management platform, provides both platform and application operators a single point of control to manage their entire Kubernetes footprint across multiple environments. Its uniquely designed capabilities—such as centralized lifecycle management, identity and access management, policy management, cluster inspections, and data protection—enable efficient, consistent, and secure management of all your Kubernetes clusters across environments at scale.
Tanzu Service Mesh, an enterprise-class service mesh offering in our portfolio, provides consistent connectivity and security for microservices across all your Kubernetes clusters and clouds in the most demanding multi-cluster and multi-cloud environments. It provides high availability and automatic failover, automated service scaling and attribute-based access policies, and traffic encryption for your applications on multi-cloud. Furthermore, with Tanzu Service Mesh, you can simplify lifecycle management of service meshes within your enterprise.
Tanzu Service Mesh and Tanzu Mission Control integration
The integration between Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Service Mesh brings consistent cluster and application operation and security management across any cloud environment, while leveraging enterprise-class service mesh technology.
Tanzu Service Mesh can be installed onto any cluster in Tanzu Mission Control by adding it as one of the integrations via the Tanzu Mission Control UI or API, no matter if the cluster is provisioned directly from Tanzu Mission Control or attached to the platform. After the integration is added, Tanzu Mission Control manages the full lifecycle of Tanzu Service Mesh in the cluster, so you don’t need to worry about complex day 2 operations such as updating to a new version of service mesh.
Let’s take a step-by-step look at how to enable the integration from Tanzu Mission Control.
First, through the Tanzu Mission Control UI, you can add Tanzu Service Mesh as an integration to the clusters. Tanzu Mission Control then installs the Tanzu Service Mesh agent, registering the cluster with Tanzu Service Mesh automatically and installing the service mesh dataplane onto the cluster.
Pick Tanzu Service Mesh from the integration drop-down menu.
Confirm the addition of Tanzu Service Mesh integration.
Once the integration is added and the agent successfully installs Tanzu Service Mesh onto your cluster, you can easily access the cluster view in the Tanzu Service Mesh directly from the Tanzu Mission Control UI. At the same time, you can also click to return to Tanzu Mission Control from Tanzu Service Mesh easily.
Tanzu Service Mesh integration is now enabled on your cluster. Open the integration, and you will be taken to the Tanzu Service Mesh console.
Cluster view in Tanzu Service Mesh
VMware Tanzu Service Mesh: Simplify the way you connect, monitor, and secure microservices
After your clusters are on-boarded to Tanzu Service Mesh, you can use Tanzu Service Mesh to implement application continuity and consistent security for applications running on multi-cluster, across multi-cloud.
Tanzu Service Mesh helps to ensure application availability and resiliency and delivers on application SLAs. Application operators can define a desired response time for their application, using the Service Level Objective (SLO) feature in Tanzu Service Mesh. Tanzu Service Mesh’s Autoscaling Service will auto-scale if the actual application performance is below the expected performance. It improves the application experiences and engagements through resiliency and responsiveness that end users have come to expect.
One of the ways that Tanzu Service Mesh helps achieve application resiliency is through a logical abstraction called Global Namespaces (GNS). Global Namespaces make it easier to manage the services, whereas the typical namespace concept is previously bound to a single Kubernetes deployment. This feature makes it possible to define a logical concept of an application that spans across Kubernetes clusters on multiple clouds and apply consistent policies such as the auto-scaling policy mentioned above to that application.
In addition, GNS also helps achieve your application security objectives. Service-to-service communication for microservices can be encrypted on the same cluster, on different clusters, or even on different clouds within the GNS configuration.
Easy steps to configure a Global Namespace across multiple clusters and multiple environments
in Tanzu Service Mesh
Unified management for platform and application operators
With the Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Service Mesh integration, platform operators can seamlessly transition between cluster management and service mesh management with enhanced observability for all the clusters running on multi-cloud Kubernetes, giving platform operators a single point of control for policy-driven cluster management while providing developers access to resources to innovate and drive business forward.
To learn more about the Tanzu Mission Control, Tanzu Service Mesh, and the integration between them, check out these VMworld 2020 sessions:
· An Introduction to VMware Tanzu Mission Control: Manage Kubernetes at Scale
· Introduction to Tanzu Service Mesh
· Connect and Secure your Applications through Tanzu Service Mesh
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