VMware Tanzu Mission Control is designed for operations teams to address complexity and increase control of their Kubernetes clusters wherever they live. In order to support customers with their multi-cloud business imperatives, VMware made an early commitment to provide data protection capability in Tanzu Mission Control, designed to help enterprises more confidently and safely run critical workloads on Kubernetes. Building on its core data protection feature set, Tanzu Mission Control now extends support for more storage options, allowing customers to bring their own self-provisioned storage locations so they can leverage existing storage for a given cluster. We continue that commitment today by announcing support for Azure Blob Storage for backup.
Bring your own storage support
At its core, Tanzu Mission Control is designed to remove the cumbersome setup processes required to have compliant backups for your Kubernetes estate. In the time since it was announced, the data protection features in Tanzu Mission Control have evolved and expanded. All standard data protection use cases, such as backup, recovery, and cloning namespaces, are enabled by Tanzu Mission Control’s use of Velero under the hood.
Tanzu Mission Control also enables automated and scheduled backups, options to back up at different levels of granularity (e.g., entire clusters or selected namespaces), or the ability to perform custom partial backups using Kubernetes label selectors. Moreover, the data protection features in Tanzu Mission Control also enable backup to on-premises from cloud clusters, or vice versa, for improved resiliency on failures. Tanzu Mission Control allows administrators to provide data protection to their cluster fleet from a central user interface console, CLI, and API.
No more egress charges for backups
This new cluster backup capability to Azure Blob Storage comes in addition to previously supported AWS S3 and S3-compatible storage. Tanzu Mission Control now offers users more flexibility for Azure cluster backup with the ability to choose Azure Blob Storage as their preferred storage target to reduce network costs from data movement. In addition, consolidating data protection activities for Azure clusters onto Azure Blob Storage with Tanzu Mission Control ensures a more expedient data protection setup for what used to be a complex networking setup.
More choices for backup targets
In Tanzu Mission Control, the backup storage location can be added to the platform as a “target location” by the platform operator. These locations can then be shared with various clusters, or with cluster groups and used when you create backups. When a backup begins, it will be written to the target location that is configured for that backup. This allows different target locations to be used by different cluster groups as needed, and also allows for different backups to write to unique storage as needed.
Users can select target locations for their backups in Tanzu Mission Control’s user interface.
With today’s announcement, if you have clusters running on Azure, you can now use Azure Blob Storage for backups. Users with an existing Azure footprint in their Kubernetes estate will especially benefit from their existing knowledge of Azure services. Moreover, addition of support for Azure for backup ensures that operations teams maintain an approved security posture for applications by not necessitating movement of data to different clouds.
How Tanzu Mission Control is different
With the rise in stateful workloads, data protection solutions are needed to back up and recover both the state and data of these applications. Tanzu Mission Control can provide unique, fleet-wide data protection capabilities for enterprises to protect their most mission-critical data across clusters and clouds with efficiency and flexibility. VMware Tanzu Mission Control is the market leader in Velero usage and support for attached cluster backup as well as managed clusters. From a data protection feature roadmap, VMware continues to work toward a neutral approach and support any cloud and any managed service. To that end, VMware has future plans to add support for more backup storage options and has roadmap items focused on cluster migration and disaster recovery use case with support for restoring backups to different clusters slated for future release.
Learn more about Tanzu Mission Control on the product page, and get more details about its capabilities in the documentation.
