Today is another exciting day in the cloud native computing ecosystem, with AWS announcing Amazon EKS Distro—an upstream aligned Kubernetes distribution. EKS Distro offers consistency for customers who are deploying their apps on the managed Amazon EKS service and are looking for an on-premises deployment.
A few things stand out about this effort, and we are excited to continue working with AWS to help enterprises realize the full potential of Kubernetes.
Commitment to the Kubernetes open source community
First, upstream alignment demonstrates a continued commitment to the Kubernetes open source community as a north star for service interoperability and consistency. AWS is reinforcing that customers can rely on innovation in the open source ecosystem to power their Kubernetes experience. And in doing so, AWS is giving back to the community and bringing additional engineering strength and ideas to the table. We are particularly excited to be working with AWS through the open source community to support the deeper operationalization of Kubernetes with the Cluster API effort. We believe that everyone benefits if upstream Kubernetes is easier to deploy and maintain, and Cluster API is becoming the standard for cluster lifecycle management.
Enterprises will run Kubernetes on-premises and public cloud
Second, this announcement reinforces that enterprises will run Kubernetes as an abstraction across on-premises and public cloud. That’s why we’ve been investing for years to embed Kubernetes in the vSphere control plane—better infrastructure technology will deliver better Kubernetes experiences. Innovation on this front carries through to VMware Cloud on AWS. We intend for these to be compelling destinations to run Kubernetes. And so while we’re constantly innovating on the VMware Tanzu portfolio, we’re also working to enable distributions like EKS Distro to be complemented by that portfolio and run on vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS. That’s how our customers can embrace containers and unlock Kubernetes on the platforms they’re already using to power their businesses—it’s consistent with VMware’s longtime promise of helping customers run any app on any cloud.
Tanzu simplifies and secures the entire container lifecycle
Finally, we believe that getting Kubernetes deployed is just the first step on the journey to fully realizing its benefits. That’s why the VMware Tanzu portfolio provides all the capabilities an enterprise needs to simplify and better secure the entire container lifecycle. That starts with how developers build applications—VMware Tanzu capabilities automate the packaging and governance of containers, and put curated and validated runtimes and open source components at developers’ fingertips. We enable images to be better secured in a private registry and continuously delivered to your Kubernetes environment. And we offer you centralized control of policy for all your Kubernetes clusters. Specifically, Tanzu Mission Control enables you to manage Tanzu Kubernetes clusters, managed services like Amazon EKS and other distributions such as EKS Distro, so you can enforce compliance and consistency across clusters. As a centerpiece of your Kubernetes infrastructure, Tanzu Mission Control also integrates with our observability capabilities to provide full stack visibility (from infrastructure to apps) and service mesh to more safely and efficiently deliver code to customers.
All of these VMware Tanzu capabilities are available to customers that use our Kubernetes distribution, but also a Kubernetes distribution like EKS Distro. That’s how we complement this kind of effort from AWS and help enterprises make the best use of Kubernetes.
