Camille Crowell and Corey Dinkens contributed to this blog post.
Updated April 25, 2023: Today, we are announcing the general availability (GA) of lifecycle management capabilities of Amazon EKS Clusters through Tanzu Mission Control, including:
- Lifecycle management (LCM) of existing EKS clusters
- Automation of Amazon EKS LCM with the Terraform provider
- Support for custom Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
These capabilities empower platform engineers with a unified control plane to automate the provisioning and management of Amazon EKS clusters alongside their on-premises workloads using a variety of operational patterns. Read more.
Updated October 11, 2022: A preview of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster lifecycle management is now available in all VMware Tanzu Mission Control organizations! Users can now connect Tanzu Mission Control to their Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and create, update/upgrade, and delete EKS clusters and node pools. For more information, read the documentation, watch this 3-minute explainer video, and register to watch our on-demand webinar with AWS to see a demo of this new feature.
The VMware Tanzu team continues to work with our cloud provider partners to offer a streamlined, vendor-agnostic Kubernetes management platform. In our ongoing commitment to support customers in their multi-cloud application modernization efforts, the VMware Tanzu Mission Control team will be introducing a preview* of lifecycle management for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters in the coming months.
More choice and flexibility for developers
With lifecycle management for Amazon EKS clusters, operations teams will be able to offer more choice to their developers. By centralizing management of multiple Kubernetes cluster types with Tanzu Mission Control, operations teams will be able to efficiently manage their Kubernetes estate through consistent deployment patterns and granular access control and other policies.
Using this functionality, platform operators will be able to create, update, and delete the following cluster types through Tanzu Mission Control, with more to come in the future:
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VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere, Azure, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
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Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters
Faster Amazon EKS cluster deployment
With lifecycle management for Amazon EKS clusters, operators and developers will be able to offer a controlled and consistent environment that enables a more predictable route to deployment. By centralizing management of more cluster types, DevOps teams can get to value more quickly, while management can more predictably achieve business outcomes.
Organizations will also be able to expedite provisioning Amazon EKS clusters with guardrails, while having the flexibility for complete customization of the Amazon EKS clusters through Tanzu Mission Control APIs. Driving Amazon EKS cluster lifecycle management through Tanzu Mission Control becomes a repeatable, declarative process, allowing teams to easily integrate cluster management into existing deployment pipelines. This automation can be achieved with the Tanzu Mission Control CLI or APIs.
Tanzu Mission Control lifecycle management model
Operators will also be able to create and customize as many Amazon EKS node groups as their workloads require, which can optionally be deployed based on AWS Launch Templates to enforce repeatable node bootstrapping across clusters.
For those who are experienced with Amazon EKS, Tanzu Mission Control exposes common settings and enables you to toggle them from a familiar interface.
Streamline Kubernetes operations for platform teams
As a managed service, Amazon EKS is a well-established Kubernetes runtime with rich capabilities. If organizations have standardized on Amazon EKS, the preview of Amazon EKS cluster lifecycle management through Tanzu Mission Control will be able to bring those organizations streamlined operations through unified policy management. For example, organizations will be able to layer on additional security and access controls on top of their Amazon EKS estate to ensure consistent policies have been applied.
Additionally, with VMware’s recent announcement for cross-cluster restore through Tanzu Mission Control, Amazon EKS customers can further capitalize on their investment and increase application reliability without incurring data egress charges. Existing Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage can be further utilized for cross-cluster restoration to any other cluster that resides in your Tanzu Mission Control tenant. This will offer an unprecedented amount of flexibility and choice for our joint customers by allowing workloads to be moved between environments/tenants and tested at a rapid pace.
For organizations that are not regulated, data movement can be enabled, and they may capitalize on existing storage investments like Amazon S3 storage. For organizations that are in regulated industries, another big advantage will be the ability to deploy Amazon EKS clusters or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters to disparate tenants and regions. This enables local data tenancy for compliance with local rules.
Low-latency access to other AWS services
More lifecycle management capabilities coming soon
The preview of lifecycle management for Amazon EKS clusters will be available this quarter and will be automatically enabled for any existing Tanzu Mission Control customers. Soon after, we will be adding support to adopt existing Amazon EKS clusters for lifecycle management with Tanzu Mission Control.
Be sure to attend Session 2204 at VMware Explore to learn more about preview for Amazon EKS cluster lifecycle management.
Read about all of the VMware Tanzu announcements made at VMware Explore 2022.
VMware makes no guarantee that services announced in preview or beta will become available at a future date. The information in this article is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.
