Businesses today are prioritizing software agility to remain competitive in a rapidly changing world. However, the perks of having access to different clouds, tools, and methodologies can also bring along with it layers of complexity. As the cloud native landscape continues to grow, it’s vital that organizations are investing in capabilities that accelerate developer productivity, drive revenue, and maintain a competitive edge. This is why VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria platforms continue to bring new capabilities that empower customers to move from cloud chaos to a cloud-smart approach.
As the multi-cloud market continues to expand, the VMware Tanzu team continues to cater solutions towards customer needs and market trends. According to the State of Kubernetes 2023 report, multi-cloud has become the dominant deployment type. More than three-quarters of those surveyed utilize multiple clouds.
In addition, the public cloud market has shifted towards consumption of managed Kubernetes offerings from public cloud vendors. 80 percent of customers choose a managed offering from their cloud vendor. Although cloud-managed platforms such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) are popular, they are not turnkey solutions. These platforms require that IT teams take care of managing the Kubernetes control plan, but still require enterprises to address many other areas, such as cost control, security, data protection, scalability and performance, reliability and availability, interoperability, monitoring, analytics, and so on. This can create layers of complexity for an organization, leaving many feeling like they are engaged in a juggling act by trying to manage cost, security, and performance. In response, VMware has expedited the launch of new capabilities across VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria as well as depreciating others.
To remain in alignment with customer preferences and focus on enhancing capabilities that are in high demand, we’re currently working on plans to remove the ability to provision clusters on native public cloud in a future release of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. In the meantime, we are working to add this capability to VMware Tanzu Mission Control and, at the time of this transition, we’ll encourage customers to use Tanzu Mission Control for native public cloud needs. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities will continue to be supported until further notice.
Although the capabilities of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid will be adjusted, the broader Tanzu portfolio is being advanced. Deprecating AWS and Azure capabilities in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid simplifies the selection process for new customers and allows VMware to focus on developing the best Kubernetes solution for vSphere customers.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with supervisor services will continue to support customers looking to consume a container runtime within a VMware cloud offering such as VMware Cloud, Google Cloud VMware Engine, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, Azure VMware Solution, etc.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with management clusters will continue to be supported and is our target platform for customers that require custom architecture capabilities, edge use cases, single node clusters, IPv6 support, or other features not yet supported using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with Supervisor.
You may be wondering, what is the difference between the components of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid multi-cloud and Tanzu Mission Control?
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with management clusters run Kubernetes clusters using native public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities. Tanzu Mission Control provisions the public cloud providers managed Kubernetes offering.
In all public clouds, there are better integrations between these managed offerings and the public cloud itself. This is one of the reasons 80 percent of customers will choose native public cloud managed offerings. Leveraging Tanzu Mission Control to provision and manage the clusters that are created with these services can give customers the best experience in managing clusters on vSphere, as well as a great experience working in the public cloud in general.
You can protect the valuable data resources in your Kubernetes clusters using the backup and restore functionality provided by Velero, an open source community standard. The data protection features of Tanzu Mission Control allow you to create various types of backups for managed clusters and selectively restore the backups you have created.
To best take advantage of the Tanzu portfolio, customers should consider solutions such as VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations and VMware Tanzu Application Platform, as these are excellent solutions with a carefully chosen combination of tools for seamless delivery and management of applications on Kubernetes on vSphere, EKS, and AKS. To learn more about new releases from VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria, visit the product webpages and technical documentation.
