by: VMware Senior IT Director Varinder Kumar; VMware IT Manager Manas Singh; and VMware Lead DevOps Engineer Pervinder Sudan
This is the third blog of our series on app modernization using the VMware IT Chief Digital Transformation Office Modern App Platform (CDTO MAP) powered by VMware Tanzu™. The series details how the platform enables our developers to write and deploy code faster and allows our infrastructure teams to run modern applications at scale. In this blog, we focus on the run and manage components of the software development lifecycle.
A Standard Platform to Run Modern Apps
Every operations team wants a runtime environment that enhances monitoring, agility, resiliency, and security capabilities for their applications. At VMware, we abbreviate this as MARS. The VMware IT operations team leverages the CDTO MAP to provide operations teams with these MARS capabilities to help business growth.
Custom applications that support the business are broadly divided into two categories:
Type 1 applications have the requirements of any standard platform-level service, such as persistence, queuing, monitoring, and caching. These applications do not require specific product versions to be used for service instances. For these applications, Tanzu Application Service leverages the marketplace for provisioning the required service instances.
Type 2 applications have additional requirements for the platform-level services, such as specific services or versions, to fulfill the application business flow. For example, for applications which need graph database service instance apart from the standard persistence and caching service instances, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid™ addresses these platform-service requirements by leveraging Tanzu Application Catalog™.
CDTO Modern App Platform Helps VMware IT Achieve Results
Type 1 applications leverage a modern platform for microservices
Monitoring: VMware Tanzu Observability™ by Wavefront provides in-depth monitoring of the Tanzu Application Service infrastructure. Using Tanzu Observability, we can monitor the infrastructure from VMware vCenter® through the application-instance level.
Agility: Using Tanzu Application Service, we can address agility goals by providing dynamic scaling capabilities for app-based CPU/memory use and application throughput.
Resiliency: Tanzu Application Service also lets us provide app resiliency by ensuring the prescriptive number of instance availablity.
Security: Security functionality built into Tanzu Application Service, helps
- minimize network surface area.
- isolate customer apps and data in containers.
- encrypt connections.
- provide role-based access controls.
- ensure security of app bits in a multi-tenant environment.
The simplicity of the open-source cloud foundry (‘cf push’) command-line interface (CLI) experience for developers enhances the appeal of the platform, making it the most popular runtime within the VMware developer community. We currently have hundreds of microservices running on this platform.
Type 2 applications use Kubernetes to deliver results
Monitoring: Tanzu Observability provides in-depth monitoring of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid infrastructure. Multiple out-of-the-box dashboards provide in-depth metrics at the Kubernetes level. In addition, it provides the ability to create custom dashboards that can include application and infrastructure components in a single view.
Agility: VMware Tanzu Mission Control™ satisfies our agility goals by providing seamless Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster provisioning. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid also brings on board native agility of a Kubernetes runtime autoscaling capabilities based on metrics such as CPU/memory usage and application throughput.
Resiliency: Kubernetes runtime provides resiliency for applications by ensuring a steady number of pods are available to meet the requirements of the applications.
Security: Tanzu Kubernetes Grid ensures security and flexibility in the following ways:
- its flexible architecture isolates the pod-level network from the worker node-level network and the ingress network.
- Kubeapps and Tanzu Application Catalog provide a large catalog of ready-to-use secure images.
The runtime capabilities of Tanzu Application Service and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid form the core of the CDTO MAP and help us achieve 99.99 percent application availability. We currently have more than 500 microservices deployed on this platform, serving multiple, diverse, business functions corporatewide.
Stay tuned for the next blog in our CDTO MAP series.
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