Andrew Scorsone and Corey Dinkens contributed to this blog post.
VMware continues to see the rise of multi-cloud during our annual survey of software development and IT professionals.
With the release of our 2023 State of Kubernetes report, we saw that more than three-quarters of the respondents utilize multiple clouds (76%) and the percentage is even higher in industries such as telecom (89%), financial services and insurance (87%), and software (84%).
That is why the VMware Tanzu team continues to prioritize adding multi-cloud support to our offerings and we are glad to announce the general availability of lifecycle management (LCM) for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters so we can meet customers where they are. Platform teams can now connect their Azure account with VMware Tanzu Mission Control to manage the lifecycle of new and existing AKS clusters including the ability to create, update/scale, upgrade, and delete AKS clusters and node pools.
This added support is intended to reduce multi-cloud silos for our customers and it comes in addition to the support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid in cloud and vSphere environments, empowering platform engineers with a common abstraction to manage the lifecycle of diverse cluster distributions.
As we keep a pulse on our customers and their needs, we speculated that multi-cloud was increasing in popularity for reasons of availability, geographic reach, and avoiding vendor lock-in and our intuition has been largely confirmed when we asked the question directly on our survey this year. Reducing vendor dependency was the top reason for using multiple clouds (53%), followed by managing costs (45%), and expanding disaster recovery and cloud backup options (42%).
VMware Tanzu now offers lifecycle management support for AKS clusters
After announcing support for the lifecycle management of Amazon EKS clusters we are now glad to expand our capabilities to also include AKS clusters.
"The continued expansion of lifecycle management capabilities within Tanzu, which now include Azure AKS clusters, demonstrates our commitment to supporting our customer's multi-cloud journeys with an easy-to-use centralized platform. Customers who are managing Kubernetes across multiple clouds highlight "inadequate internal experience and expertise" as a top challenge* and Tanzu empowers them with a centralized management hub to apply controls and security constraints consistently across environments. This reduces the skill gap and context switching for operators while allowing them to provide the latest upstream cloud capabilities to developers."
—Khaled Sedky, vice president of R&D, VMware Tanzu
*VMware State of Kubernetes 2023 report
VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations is a solution that can provide a simplified, consistent approach to container deployment, scaling, intrinsically more secure connectivity, and management with tools, automation, and data-driven insights to our customers.
The Kubernetes management hub provided within this solution is Tanzu Mission Control, where customers can now connect their Azure account, and manage the lifecycle of new and existing AKS clusters. This includes the ability to create, update/scale, upgrade, and delete AKS clusters and node pools.
View of the Create AKS cluster workflow page in Tanzu Mission Control.
The Tanzu-enhanced lifecycle management capabilities empower platform engineers with a unified control plane to automate the provisioning and management of AKS clusters along with the previously offered support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Amazon EKS clusters. It can create a runway for developers, alongside any on-premises workloads, which offers consistent clusters with guardrails so that they can readily optimize the software development process.
Tanzu Mission Control is able to provision and manage the lifecycle of AKS clusters and node pools on the customer's behalf which can streamline tooling, integration of customers' cloud infrastructure, and application deployment pipeline. This can help reduce the complexity and nuance of multicluster management, as well as facilitate self-service cluster updates and upgrades with guardrails for different teams, from platform to development.
Using Terraform, an infrastructure-as-code tool, for cluster provisioning is also an option available for platform teams who can leverage this comprehensive Terraform provider, which has now been updated with modules necessary to manage the AKS lifecycle declaratively. This capability can increase DevOps deployment velocity by adding a route to production, reducing imperative approaches for deploying infrastructure and applications, and allowing teams to use the same syntax and toolchain for improved consistency.
Supporting customers through their multi-cloud journeys
VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram often explains that the typical cloud journey can be broken down into three phases:
- Cloud first – Embrace public cloud; focus on building customer-facing apps
- Cloud chaos – Greater cloud choice leads to a massive spike in complexity; many organizations are currently here
- Cloud smart – The freedom to select the right cloud for the right app
While multi-cloud is the preferred deployment model for Kubernetes, it’s not all smooth sailing, and many companies are in the cloud chaos stage.
When we asked IT professionals about their top Kubernetes management challenges we saw that inadequate internal experience and expertise increased by 13 percentage points to 57 percent from the prior year’s survey. This likely means that IT staff are struggling in the face of multi-cloud operations or struggling to keep up with the rapid growth of the Kubernetes footprint, or both.
Of the respondents, 52 percent voiced meeting security and compliance requirements as their second top challenge and difficulty to manage cluster lifecycles and upgrades grabbed the third position comprising 42 percent of the respondents.
Source: VMware State of Kubernetes report. Detailed progression from 2021 (bottom, light blue) to 2023 (top, dark blue) answers
These results give us confidence that we are in the right direction with our investments in empowering our customers with a centralized Tanzu hub that allows them to manage multiple Kubernetes cluster types from a single location and to mitigate the expertise, security, and lifecycle management challenges.
Mitigating Kubernetes security challenges with VMware Tanzu
Tanzu Mission Control offers not only cluster lifecycle management capabilities for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Amazon EKS, and now AKS but also, a robust policy engine, data protection, and automation capabilities for fleet management leveraging resource grouping by clusters, namespaces, and provisioners.
These capabilities are available for both provisioned or attached clusters as we should not forget that platform teams can attach any Cloud Native Computing Foundation conformant cluster to the platform, including, for example, OpenShift and Rancher clusters.
We believe Tanzu offers a compelling answer to the challenge organizations face in addressing security and compliance requirements as they embark on multicluster, multi-cloud Kubernetes management.
To learn more about the Tanzu policy engine, please watch this webinar, and to learn more about data protection, please read this blog.
When it comes to automation, organizations' security posture can be enhanced if users leverage Terraform, via this Terraform provider, for policy definitions. Learn more.
Mitigating Kubernetes cost challenges with Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu CloudHealth
We are glad to announce that the VMware team is working to include new visibility for cluster costs within Tanzu to allow platform teams to make informed decisions about scaling environments up or down and improve budget planning to support an efficient and optimized platform.
This new Kubernetes FinOps capability for multi-cloud, multicluster environments can benefit platform teams that use both Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu CloudHealth (formerly known as VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth). With a new integration between these two VMware solutions, platform engineers would be able to see the cost of Amazon EKS or AKS clusters (attached or managed), and also the estimated cost of new Amazon EKS or AKS clusters as they initiate and move along a cluster provisioning workflow.
Reviewing the cost of Kubernetes clusters directly in the Tanzu Mission Control UI enables teams to better prepare for multi-cloud cost challenges, such as detecting cost overruns and preventing budgetary issues while benefiting from a platform that is both efficient and optimized for future growth.
What's next?
Get started by creating an AKS credential, and register to watch our webinar on September 12, 2023 to learn how to streamline multi-cloud operations.
If you are attending VMware Explore (August 21–24, 2023) in Las Vegas, we will cover Kubernetes cost management in the following breakout session: Discover Your Clusters, Back Them Up, and Manage Costs with VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria. Make sure to add it to your schedule.
See all the news announced by the VMware Tanzu team at VMware Explore. And connect with us on social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook), watch our YouTube videos, and follow the Tanzu blog for more news.
