2022 kubernetes news products Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations

Streamline and Secure Kubernetes Adoption Across Clouds with Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations

Darin Zook and Boskey Savla co-wrote this blog post.

Today, at VMware Explore, we are announcing new capabilities within VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations to enable organizations to streamline and secure Kubernetes adoption at scale across clouds.

As organizations have continued to modernize workloads utilizing cloud native technologies, operations teams have faced new challenges. VMware’s 2022 State of Kubernetes report indicates that the number of organizations using multiple public clouds continues to accelerate year over year. Additionally, 36 percent of respondents indicate that they are already utilizing Kubernetes in multiple public clouds. 97 percent of those surveyed say they are seeking services and support for Kubernetes tooling to effectively operate Kubernetes at scale.  

Announced earlier this year, Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations offers organizations a foundation for operating a modern, multi-cloud container infrastructure. Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations provides operations teams with a consistent approach to enabling container deployment, scaling, and management with the necessary tools, automation, and observability to manage workloads at scale across their multi-cloud estate. 

The new capabilities being added to Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations aim to continue accelerating app modernization, while helping organizations simplify operations across clouds, secure their workloads and infrastructure, and optimize their multi-cloud operations. 

Simplify platform operations

New capabilities in VMware Tanzu Mission Control announced at VMware Explore include a preview of lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). With this enhancement, customers will be able to directly provision and manage the entire lifecycle of their new EKS clusters through Tanzu Mission Control. This will enable platform operations teams to apply more consistent controls while providing the latest upstream EKS capabilities to the developers they serve. 

Provisioning new EKS clusters with Tanzu Mission Control

Data protection is of paramount focus for every organization. At VMware Explore, we also announced that Tanzu Mission Control features new multi-cloud, Kubernetes application data protection with cross-cluster restore. This creates greater ease and flexibility for use cases such as alternate site recovery, application mobility (move across clouds), or change management. This new capability allows for more reliability for applications with restoration across any cloud or on-premises infrastructure. 

Restoring Kubernetes cluster backup from Azure to VMware vSphere clusters

Also announced at VMware Explore, VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 is now available.  New capabilities within Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 include a unified experience for applications, whether they are running in hybrid, private, or public clouds, which streamlines the management, provisioning, and lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters. The second edition of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is tightly integrated with VMware vSphere 8 and also brings open source API alignment, improved application lifecycle management capabilities with Carvel-based tooling, and provides platform operators with more flexibility and control thanks to the cluster API feature, ClusterClass.

Secure workloads and infrastructure

As Kubernetes growth has continued to accelerate, so too has the need for robust modern application security and DevOps toolchain security. An advantage of SaaS-based tooling is that continuous delivery of new capabilities and functionality helps you adapt and address security needs over time. 

VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, built on VMware NSX, continues to build on its already-robust service mesh offering and now includes support for customer-owned enterprise certificate authority (CA) and enterprise registries. These enhancements enable customers to more easily manage certificates generated for services as part of the organizational CA trust chain and provide the ability to pull images used by Tanzu Service Mesh from their own registry system, allowing them to align with policies that may require scanning images locally before using them in their network. Customers can onboard new Kubernetes clusters to Tanzu Service Mesh by downloading Tanzu Service Mesh components from their own private registry. Additional new capabilities include automated deployment of clusters that use a private IP for ingress instead of the default mode in public clouds, which enables an Internet-facing IP access to the cluster. Doing this automatically through Tanzu Service Mesh can reduce the chance for human error in configuration and the need to follow how each cloud provider implements networking.

Installing Tanzu Service Mesh via a private image registry

An increasingly common threat for organizations is the risk of sophisticated bot attacks against their workloads, resulting in data leakage, loss of service availability, skewed data analytics, and financial and reputation loss. VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer, available as part of Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, has introduced new integrated bot management functionality in the platform and is available for customers to deploy now. These new capabilities can enable organizations to better identify bot traffic, classify it as good or bad, and take action against it to block, allow, or limit its exposure within their organization.  

Bot detection via NSX Advanced Load Balancer

Optimize multi-cloud observability

When organizations adopt Kubernetes, operations teams face the additional complexity of visibility and insights across not just infrastructure resources but also into application platforms and workloads. VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly VMware Tanzu Observability) now provides organizations a complete unified observability platform, unifying traces, metrics, and logs to enable more actionable insights and reduce mean-time-to-resolution at enterprise scale. The platform unifies data, insights, and actions across IT, and offers both out-of-the-box and customized dashboards for applications, with more than 250 vendor integrations to start capturing real-time data for any stack in minutes. 

Centralized logging via Aria Operations for Applications

More deployment options for Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations 

We know that many organizations begin the application modernization journey in their private cloud. Together with DellEMC, VMware is announcing VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations on Dell VxRail to deliver modern infrastructure suited for modern applications combined with full-stack lifecycle management of provisioned Kubernetes clusters on a modern HCI. This continues our vision to provide new deployment options to simplify, secure, and modernize your infrastructure platform. Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations is an expertly curated stack that can provide the foundation for platform operations teams to build a modern container infrastructure at scale across multiple clouds.

Together, these announcements continue to provide organizations with the necessary resources to simplify container management with tools, automation, and data-driven insights that boost developer productivity, secure applications and data running on your Kubernetes infrastructure, and optimize application and infrastructure performance across all your clouds.

If you want to learn more, join us at VMware Explore and check out these sessions: 

Read about all of the VMware Tanzu announcements made at VMware Explore 2022.

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