Another successful AWS re:Invent is in the books for VMware Tanzu. This year, like in previous years, the event had a high attendance with 51,000+ people descending on Las Vegas to learn and explore everything AWS-related. However, there were some notable changes in the focus areas for 2022. This year, VMware was pleased to see that Amazon hosted their first-ever Kubernetes Leadership segment at re:Invent, delivered by Barry Cooks, vice president, Kubernetes for AWS.
Here are some key takeaways from this new focus area and how VMware aligns with AWS to jointly fuel our customers' digital transformations.
AWS and VMware Tanzu are making Kubernetes easier for developers
During the Kubernetes Leadership session, AWS highlighted that Kubernetes’ complexity is killing developer innovation. Cooks cited a Deloitte survey of CIOs that said “80 percent of a developer’s time is spent on the operations of applications and only 20 percent on innovation.” Simplifying Kubernetes for platform teams and developers alike is our mission with the VMware Tanzu portfolio.
At re:Invent 2022, the VMware Tanzu team had customer conversations that echoed AWS’ findings and discussed how organizations can simplify the developer process on Kubernetes with a combination of capabilities and features that unleash innovation and enforce policies. We heard that Kubernetes consumers and practitioners alike want a common toolset to bring together development and operations. DevOps needs smooth collaboration to transform their operational models and scale. However, organizations also need to improve the developer experience while controlling costs. VMware Tanzu Application Platform improves developer experience with pre-paved paths to deployment so that organizations can increase pace to market and show a higher ROI. Tanzu Application Platform works on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), allowing organizations to speed up their route to production with Tanzu and Amazon EKS.
AWS and VMware are committed to meeting joint customers where they are
In his one-hour leadership session, Cooks also mentioned VMware vSphere as being a key target infrastructure for their Kubernetes Anywhere initiative. Amazon EKS Anywhere is an open source deployment option for Amazon EKS clusters that allows customers to create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises. VMware vSphere customers that already have an entitlement to VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid runtime can now add Amazon EKS Anywhere (EKS-A) to their environment, attach both cluster types, and policy manage them via VMware Tanzu Mission Control, reducing complexity for their organization.
Additionally, the VMware team was onsite at AWS re:Invent to demonstrate how Tanzu Mission Control can directly lifecycle manage Amazon EKS commercial clusters in any cloud, including the AWS Cloud. VMWare Tanzu and AWS are aligned on bridging technologies and helping customers wherever they are in their Kubernetes journey.
Cost challenges are a key focus area for DevOps teams
Cooks also called out the fact that there is an urgent need for cost controls. He acknowledged that macroeconomic pressures have caused a lot of organizations to find technology-enabled savings or cut costs. Happily, VMware Tanzu and Amazon excel in this area of our “better together” story.
VMware Tanzu focuses on reducing silos and enabling greater productivity with a portfolio of products that help developers do more with less, as well as control costs through unified observability available in our VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations solution. Organizations have visibility, and are able to better align strategy and adjust their choices so they can control costs. In addition, Amazon EKS announced at re:Invent that it has integrated with Kubecost for individual pod effectiveness and automated pod cost management. These complementary capabilities can help IT teams demonstrate their cost savings and increase the speed of their time to market through improved productivity with VMware Tanzu and Amazon EKS.
Best practices enabled by technology are key to customer success
Containers can proliferate very quickly, and at VMware, we have seen this time and time again. Cooks acknowledged that container implementations can become management intensive overnight. But VMware and Amazon EKS are the perfect partners in helping organizations build a modern foundation for modern apps. Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations can relieve management burden as customers expand their Kubernetes footprint in their application transformation initiatives. Whether they are using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Amazon EKS, or any other Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) conformant cluster, organizations need to automatically apply guardrails so that best practices are baked into the development process from the beginning.
It’s great to see that VMware Tanzu and Amazon EKS are similarly focused on institutionalizing Kubernetes best practices through automated guardrails via Tanzu Mission Control. Having consolidated policy management through a single control plane that manages any CNCF-conformant cluster reduces Kubernetes complexity and helps organizations remain compliant.
Wrap up
At AWS re:Invent, the Tanzu team was pleased to see that Amazon and VMware’s priorities continue to align on Kubernetes initiatives and investment for joint customer value. Like Cooks said, “The K in EKS stands for Kubernetes, and we are not doing this alone.” And as an AWS partner and major open source contributor, VMware Tanzu is pleased to continue alongside AWS in that “better together” journey.
Learn more about how VMware Tanzu improves developer productivity, increases security, and efficiently manages Kubernetes at scale in this video shot live from AWS re:Invent 2022.
