Authored by Daniel Koeck, Senior Product Line Manager for vSphere
We are excited to announce the Initial Availability (IA) of Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI), formerly Project Cascade, to address the needs of consumers in a multi-cloud world. This is a unified Kubernetes interface for both on-demand infrastructure (IaaS) and containers (CaaS) across VMware Cloud – available through an open command line interface (CLI), APIs, and a GUI. To match the bar set by Public Cloud today, modern infrastructure needs to be elastic extendable and self-service consumable so that it can effectively manage all needed resources.
CCI, included as part of vSphere+, offers efficiencies and economies for enterprise workloads and applications spread across On-Prem and VMware Cloud, creating streamlined processes that can be applied across the entire VMware Cloud platform from a single interface. Platform consumers (including Administrators, Developers, DevOps, and Platform Engineering) are continuously turning to modern development practices, containerization, and Kubernetes with the goal of improving consistency, speed and overall deployment agility. They do expect a modern experience where they can discover, deploy, and manage runtime and services like virtual machines, Load Balancer, Storage, Database, or others.
Back in 2020 with vSphere 7, VMware introduced vSphere with Tanzu, a single, streamlined solution to bridge the gap between IT operations and developers with a new kind of infrastructure for traditional, modern & cloud-native applications both on premises and in public clouds. Any consumer of the platform can easily deploy workloads like Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters (TKC) or Virtual Machines into a vSphere Cluster that has been enabled with vSphere with Tanzu, also known as a Supervisor Cluster. CCI enables all consumers of vSphere with Tanzu enabled clouds to experience Multi-Cloud Consumption through true open multi-cloud with an industry standard programmatic interface that is powered by Kubernetes.
Let’s use a simple example of a classic 3-tier web app. While the presentation tier and application tier run containerized, you might need one or more VMs to supply a database for the data tier, as well as added services like a load balancer or certificate. Through CCI, teams can now provision containers, VMs and added services to different VMware Cloud Endpoints (On-Prem and VMware Cloud) all from a single Kubernetes API / CLI or UI. Similar to how teams use application source code, operations teams can use configuration files stored as code (infrastructure as code) to generate the same environment every time it is deployed, just as application source code generates the same application binaries every time it is built.
CCI groups users into projects, binding capacity limits and available regions to a consumer’s sandbox. Regions aggregate Supervisors and supervisor namespaces from across the infrastructure into a common endpoint. This abstraction matches concepts and usability associated with public cloud today. On top, vSphere with Tanzu Platform and CCI provide pluggability. Additional IaaS Services can be plugged into vSphere with Tanzu through Kubernetes custom resources (CRDs) and are available for consumption through CCI (CLI & API). CCI provides the capability to extend the UI with Service-specific plugins as well.
Now, the consumer has a single endpoint to self-service resources assigned to entitled projects through API, and from there they can manage all resources assigned to a project in VMware Cloud. While the SDDC infrastructure instances will be consistent, the underlying hardware infrastructure and locations may expose different functionality. For instance, some clouds or on-prem hardware may leverage SmartNics, allowing much greater networking performance and greater security. Other clouds or on-prem hardware will have the latest and greatest accelerators, such as GPUs and FPGAs, which apps can take advantage of to improve performance. Some locations will enable regulatory compliance where certain apps must stay within certain geographical areas. The power of the CCI consumption experience allows these hardware and location differences and innovations to shine through, enabling consumers to take advantage of them via self-service.
CCI is a joint project between vSphere+ and Aria Automation teams bringing the best of both worlds together. vSphere+ brings Cloud Benefits On-Premises through the following key benefits:
Consolidate Management Across Multi-Cloud and/or larger environments – Enhance operational efficiency by centralizing management, IAM and governance through a Cloud Console.
Monitor and Act on Global Insights – Monitor global inventory, alert status, and security posture.
