Deploying packages to distributed Kubernetes clusters is time-consuming. Those in charge of provisioning and preparing infrastructure for application teams know the pain of preparing clusters for production. Provisioning is only the start of a laborious process required to prepare a cluster. Once the cluster is up and running, deploying tools for things like monitoring and security is a DevOps imperative.
In its own right, package management can be tedious and vulnerable to manual errors. Current methods for managing packages at scale involve different user inputs and require multiple manual triggers of a mixture of pipelines and other automation technologies. This combination often also involves Helm chart repositories, and configurations stored in git repositories, leading to a number of potential pitfalls and labor-intensive operations. In addition, creating more touch points into the environment often slows down the DevOps cycle.
Tanzu Mission Control makes the readiness process easier
Today, the VMware Tanzu Mission Control team is announcing the availability of a catalog that unifies software package sources directly in the Tanzu Mission Control console.
This feature addition enables operators to declaratively deploy software to their Kubernetes clusters hosted in AWS, GCP, or Azure. No matter your cluster type, Tanzu Mission Control enables you to continuously deploy and manage software to different types of clusters by leveraging the power of Carvel.
Current users of Tanzu Mission Control will see a separate catalog tab in the Tanzu Mission Control console. Packages can be installed from this tab through a simple three-step process:
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Choose a name to identify your installation.
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Give the Carvel package manager permissions to manage this install on your behalf.
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Declare your desired configuration and let the Carvel package manager take care of the rest.
That’s it!
For more details about this feature, visit the documentation.
What’s included?
Tanzu Mission Control operators can visit the catalog tab on their Tanzu Mission Control console to see the collection of Tanzu Standard edition packages available for deployment on clusters.
The Tanzu Standard edition includes:
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Cert-manager
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Contour
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External-dns
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Fluentbit
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Grafana
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Harbor
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Multus-cni
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Prometheus
The Tanzu Mission Control catalog utilizes the Carvel tools to enable cluster administrators to deploy packages with a few simple clicks. This gives operators the reassurance of continuous software deployments within their clusters.
To learn more about the Carvel packaging toolkit, please visit the Carvel Community blog.
What's next?
As of today, you can add Carvel package repositories that are not behind authentication through the Tanzu Mission Control catalog. Deployment of packages from a repository requiring authentication is an area we are focusing on developing in the near future. Over time, new package sources will be added to Tanzu Mission Control and appear directly in the console for ease of deployment.
Helm chart support is also a priority focus for future availability in Tanzu Mission Control. But note that Carvel and Helm do offer different capabilities. To learn more about Carvel benefits, check out the CNCF webinar hosted by VMware.
You can also learn about other Tanzu Mission Control features and capabilities in some of our recent blog announcements.
