As Kubernetes Becomes Ubiquitous, VMware Aims To Solve New Challenges

You can tell the maturity of something by its challenges. For example, the problems of a 27-year-old are different from those of a 47-year-old. In case it’s not clear, this is my attempt at making a relatable analogy to the maturity of Kubernetes. Though, it might be more accurate to say Kubernetes has reached a point of ubiquity; industry analyst research, foundation surveys, and studies including VMware’s 2022 State of Kubernetes report certainly indicate such. Now that Kubernetes has taken a firm position in the cloud native infrastructure landscape, it’s on to resolving what are, frankly, problems that come with maturity: open source innovation, manageability, usability, and security.

Indeed, more than half of respondents to this year’s State of Kubernetes survey say they are deploying Kubernetes across multiple public clouds and on premises, while the number of clusters deployed year over year is growing steadily. For a more in-depth look at the VMware State of Kubernetes report, check out my colleague Coté’s blog post breaking it down here.

With the combination of Kubernetes’ ubiquity plus hybrid and multi-cloud models, it’s no surprise usability and operational challenges, including security, persist. VMware is solving for these challenges on many dimensions. Read on to learn how.

Attending KubeCon EU? Be sure to catch Ben Hale’s keynote session, PlatformOps: It’s all about developer experience, and check out other opportunities to connect with the VMware team at the event.

Addressing the developer experience on Kubernetes

A challenge that surfaces among the State of Kubernetes respondents is usability, especially when it comes to developers. In the past 18 months, supporting application developers with a great user experience (DevEx) has gained ground as a business endeavor. In fact, in VMware’s most recent FY23 Q1 Executive Pulse survey of more than 400 enterprise technology executives, almost 90 percent of respondents tied positive revenue metrics to application deployments, and half recognized DevEx as having the greatest potential to increase revenue for their organizations.

Source: VMware FY23 Q1 Executive Pulse; N=459 Enterprise Technology Executives; N=451 Enterprise Technology Executives prioritizing reliability

Tanzu Application Platform for a great developer experience on any Kubernetes

Since the launch of VMware Tanzu Application Platform, VMware has been working to address a developer experience gap by delivering an app-aware experience to enterprise developers on any Kubernetes. To that end, the latest release of Tanzu Application Platform addresses application deployment and visibility across multiple clusters. With Tanzu Application Platform 1.1, VMware is delivering capabilities that can help customers shorten time to value, simplify the developer experience, strengthen their security posture, and safeguard existing investment in Kubernetes and developer tools. The newly added capabilities support efforts to:

• Accelerate workload deployment across multiple clusters and gain visibility across environments

• Dramatically simplify the platform deployment process with installation profiles

• Drive greater agility with software supply chain ability to use prebuilt container images

• Get instant visualization on workload status as it moves through the supply chain

• Build a strong security foundation with consistent role-based access controls (RBAC)

For the latest about Tanzu Application Platform and how to improve DevEx, check out this webinar, 7 Ways to Improve Developer Experience and Accelerate Software Delivery on Kubernetes.

Latest Tanzu Community Edition release speeds time to developer productivity

VMware Tanzu Community Edition, the freely available open source distribution of VMware Tanzu for learners and users, now enables application developers to experience the power of VMware Tanzu more quickly and easily, speeding their time to productivity with the same open source technologies that underpin Tanzu Application Platform. The latest enhancements to Tanzu Community Edition add value for application developers and complement existing capabilities that serve cloud native platform and application operators.

Available today, VMware Tanzu Community Edition 0.12 adds new features that can:

• Enable application developers to get a ready-to-use application platform installed and running on their local workstation in minutes

• Immediately deploy basic web applications without knowledge of Kubernetes or other underlying platform technologies

• Expand choice for developers with the ability to run local Kubernetes clusters using Minikube, Kind, or Docker Desktop

For more information about the latest version of Tanzu Community Edition, including the DevEx-enhancing features, read more here.

Docker Desktop now available with VMware Tanzu Community Edition Extension

Docker today announced the Docker Extensions program through which trusted ecosystem partners can provide access to their software via Docker Desktop, enabling developers to speed innovation without needing to learn new patterns. A premier participant in the program, VMware is today introducing the VMware Tanzu Community Edition Extension for Docker Desktop.

The extension enables developers to create and delete Tanzu Community Edition clusters in their local Docker environment using familiar Docker Desktop tooling. Clusters can be created with one-click ease, and be ready to use in just a few minutes. With Tanzu cluster creation capabilities integrated into Docker Desktop, developers can now very quickly build the complete and robust local container environment they need for cloud native development.

Open source innovation for modern apps

VMware recognizes that open source innovation is at the heart of any strategic, software-led initiative, whether at a software vendor or end-user company. That’s why VMware has embraced an open source–first approach to innovation across the Tanzu portfolio. As such, VMware leads or contributes to a number of CNCF projects, including:

Carvel – A package of single-purpose, composable tools for building, configuration, and deployment applications on Kubernetes. Last month, with the launch of the Kubeapps API service, Kubeapps users can deploy Carvel and Flux packages as well as Helm packages, not only enhancing the developer experience, but also solving a long-standing security issue by removing the reverse proxy to the Kubernetes API server. Read more about how the latest version of Kubeapps allows users to discover new implementations that make it a robust and secure way to deploy applications on Kubernetes infrastructure here.

Knative – A developer-focused serverless application layer, which is a great complement to the existing Kubernetes application constructs, officially joined the CNCF as an incubating project earlier this year. As a member of the Knative Executive Committee, VMware worked with other members and the Knative community to move that project along and on the release of the 1.0 version. In keeping with VMware’s open source–first mission, we’ve based Cloud Native Runtimes for VMware Tanzu on Knative eventing and serving. Check out what innovations are happening across the Knatvie landscape at KnativeCon taking place in conjunction with KubeCon Europe.

Istio – Now in its fifth year, has gained widespread user adoption in all industries from organizations such as Freddie Mac, Intuit, T-Mobile, Walmart, among others. On the heels of Google’s proposal for Istio to join the CNCF, VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, which has incorporated Istio since its release, announced its commitment to the Istio project. With Tanzu Service Mesh’s new Istio Mode, operators can interact directly with the open source Istio deployment on their clusters while using Tanzu Service Mesh for its lifecycle management, observability, and more.

RabbitMQ – Though not a CNCF project, is the most widely deployed open source message broker, with tens of thousands of users. VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ is the commercial-grade message broker that connects multiple distributed applications based on open source RabbitMQ. Most recently, the RabbitMQ team added an event-streaming capability, called RabbitMQ Streams. This new type of data structure capability allows RabbitMQ to process  “data in motion”; process high-volume data in real time and at scale. With event-streaming capabilities, RabbitMQ can support a whole new set of application use cases that would have been tedious to implement with traditional message broker capabilities. Supported use cases include apps needing to read same messages, replaying same data, processing high-throughput data. This open source innovation is not available to enterprise customers. Learn more about RabbitMQ Streams in this webinar.

Learn more about how VMware’s embrace of open source fuels our innovative spirit on our Open Source blog.

Great Kubernetes ubiquity requires great manageability

As Kubernetes matures, usage surges, and multi-cloud becomes more prevalent across the enterprise, it’s time to consider how you scale your operations to effectively manage this growth. VMware solutions enable you to operate your Kubernetes estate cohesively, more securely—whether it’s any or many clouds.

Enhanced insights into Kubernetes by Tanzu Observability

VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is delivering critical offerings to help you in your cloud transformation journey, providing immediate insights into Kubernetes workloads and environments, by enabling you to adopt best practices when it comes to observing Kubernetes workloads. Tanzu Observability can streamline the onboarding process to less than ten minutes and help reduce onboarding time, and enables users to adopt a GitOps practice for scaling out Kubernetes configuration. Users can benefit from holistic observability of key services and maintain key SLIs and SLOs, with support for common distributions of Kubernetes such as VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, OpenShift, and others.

Kubernetes and cloud security posture management by CloudHealth Secure State

CloudHealth Secure State now delivers unified Kubernetes and cloud security posture management capabilities (KSPM) enabling customers with deep visibility into misconfiguration risks across 500 services and resource types including managed and self-managed Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud or data center. Users can leverage real-time, multi cloud search to inspect Kubernetes resources configurations as well as visualize relationships with services outside a cluster. With support for 200 Kubernetes security best practices, 20 compliance frameworks, and custom rules, you can proactively identify advanced risks to prevent cloud hijackings and improve compliance when running Kubernetes using Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Red Hat OpenShift, Rancher, and several other Kubernetes distributions.

By Rita Manachi
Source VMware Tanzu