Valmis kaasaegne konteineride infrastruktuur

High-performance and fully automated VMware Tanzu Kubernetes clusters available in Estonia as a cloud service

The VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid solution allows workloads and infrastructure located on a micro-architecture to be easily installed and managed in a significantly more cost-effective manner than with native Kubernetes.

Growing businesses need applications that are constantly improving but 24/7 reliable, secure and highly available. To meet these requirements, companies are increasingly moving to a container-based microservices architecture and applying DevOps principles. With their help, greater flexibility and operational efficiency are achieved. In addition to these, however, a scalable infra environment is also needed, which supports automation and life cycle management, enables flexible hosting of applications and smooth response to external disturbances as well as rapidly changing customer needs.

All these three aspects together (i.e. continuous and smooth innovation of the service) have so far only been available to larger technical teams with specific competencies. Not anymore. In the article, we discuss in depth what the VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid solution is and how it can help both small and large companies.

How to ensure smooth and fast innovation implementation?

One option is to simply hire more IT professionals, but this is both costly and difficult, as there is a shortage of labor with infrastructure skills in the market. An alternative is to use an innovative automated development and infrastructure environment that allows services to be easily and efficiently managed throughout the entire lifecycle. All operations from environment creation, configuration, monitoring and backup are automated and available through both UI and API interfaces.

The VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid solution allows workloads and infrastructure located on a micro-architecture to be easily installed and managed in a significantly more cost-effective manner than with native Kubernetes.

With Tanzu, you can plan, build, manage and interconnect cloud-based container applications in public, private or hybrid cloud environments. The solution is modular, scalable and fast. Developers and users do not need to know the administrative tasks of Kubernetes clusters, but focus on applications and content.

VMware value chain - VMware's portfolio of services now fully covers application lifecycle management

With successive strategic acquisitions - Wavefront (2017), Heptio (2018), Bitnami (2019) and finally Pivotal (2019) - VMware, known as a provider of virtualization services, has become a leader in the field of digital transformation and cloud technology.

In 2020, VMare Tanzu entered the market, which was related to the VMware vSphere OnPremises or Private cloud environment and was available only to large companies in terms of price.

Today, VMware's portfolio includes end-to-end lifecycle products and automation capabilities that have made modern infrastructure for scalable applications available to small and medium-sized businesses through VMware cloud service providers.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid provides a Kubernetes platform developed and supported by VMware. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid can be used to deploy Kubernetes clusters in data centers defined by VMware software and in various public cloud environments. For example, VMware Tanzu is supported by WaveCom's VMware Cloud, AWS, Azure and Google. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid enables Kubernetes clusters to be made available to users worldwide as a utility. In this way, it works similar to an electrical grid.

What is VMware Tanzu

VMware Tanzu Kubernetes is a new generation infrastructure-as-code service that can be used to create and host high-performance applications based on microservices architecture, ensure Kubernetes consistency in different environments, and manage all clusters from a single controller.

VMware Tanzu is a large family with ten different products. It covers the entire lifecycle of a microservices application, from creation and launch to ongoing management.

VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid provides organizations with a unified Kubernetes environment ready to integrate end-user applications and different ecosystems. TKG Standard Runtime is a key part of the VMware Tanzu portfolio of services.

Tanzu VERSUS Traditional Kubernetes: Difference and Advantages

With all kinds of cloud services as well as native Kubernetes solutions now readily available, many companies are using Kubernetes as a development and delivery platform for their modern applications.

Traditional Kubernetes management is complex and automations are expensive, as everything has to be scripted yourself or open source software that requires deep knowledge of a specific solution. However, this makes Kubernetes solutions and deployment expensive. Until now, Kubernetes has been available to larger and primarily international companies that have their own DevOps departments.

With Tanzu's Kubernetes Grid service, developers have secure access to fully compliant Kubernetes clusters in public clouds. IT admins have visibility into Kubernetes workloads and clusters and policy management of VMs and/or containers across the platform in one place.

The disadvantage of the native approach is that processes such as fully automated lifecycle management and automated management and scalability of various cloud resources (network, storage, compute) are not covered.

VMware uses open source Kubernetes, which means developers don't need to worry about application compatibility.

Simplifies the work of developers

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid provides a new type of infrastructure for containerized applications in both local data centers and public clouds, bridging the gap between DevOps engineers, network administrators, and developers.

TKG Standard Runtime is primarily aimed at end users and developers and offers an advanced feature set with simplified cluster lifecycle management. Kubernetes clusters can now be created, updated, deleted, and resized via the GUI or Cluster API user interface. It makes everyday tasks easier and faster than ever before. Users no longer need to have special knowledge of creating and managing Kubernetes clusters.

Developers can manage the Kubernetes platform and build solutions with the familiar kubectl tool, and IT administrators can manage clusters in the familiar Cloud Director environment. A Cloud Director administrator sees and manages Kubernetes cluster objects as Cloud Director entities in the same way as virtual machines or regular network services.

Functionality

TKG Standard Runtime is highly available, i.e. it offers multi-node control-plane and worker clusters. All TKG components such as cluster virtual machines, network services (including load balancers and firewall) and Named Disk Persistent Volumes are installed in a VMware Cloud virtual data center that can be managed in Cloud Director.

When installing a cluster or service/container, automation creates network services such as NAT rules, load balancer, and firewall based on NSX and AVI LB resources. The VMware CSI interface provisions the necessary Persistent disks, for which the Named Disk functionality is used.

Clusters hosting applications with different requirements can now be configured as services/packages to make them immediately available to users, saving significant time and effort. When creating TKG clusters, the pre-installed Tanzu core packages reduce additional configuration requirements to provide the user with ready-made TKG clusters. Other additional packages supported by the TKG Standard Runtime, including Harbor (helm registry), Fluent Bit (log processing), HAProxy (proxy/loadbalancer), Contour (input container), Prometheus (metrics), Grafana ( metrics visualization), Velero (backup), etc.

Scalability

As an additional improvement, it is now possible to scale clusters quickly and flexibly. For example, add or remove master or worker node servers with the push of a button, or increase the capacity of existing servers from the same platform. The activity can also be automated to meet the corresponding demand. This can be done with the Cluster API command, which saves the time and effort of manually allocating resources.

Security and availability

High availability and load balancing (vSphere HA/DRS), monitoring mechanisms and a set of information security tools are built into the VMware Enterprise Plus platform.

Additional anti-affinity rules, which keep cluster node virtual machines on different cloud compute servers, give Tanzu clusters greater availability.

Different types of policies (access, registry, network, volume, security) can be created in VMware Tanzu Mission Control to manage the security and operations of Kubernetes clusters. Policies allow you to provide a set of rules that ensure the security of the organization and all objects.

In early 2023, another long-awaited functionality was completed. VMware OSE, or object storage extension, which allows, in addition to highly available S3 service and graphical file manager, also to backup and restore Kubernetes clusters.

Secure and automated networking with VMware NSX

Ultimate security in networks is provided by the NSX platform, which provides context-sensitive security policies for managing virtual routers and firewall rules.

VMware NSX is a software-based solution that allows you to make code changes and implement a completely new architecture flexibly and quickly, thanks to the fact that changes are defined in software structures. Using VMware NSX provides full network automation in VMware Tanzu clusters: network connections, access rights, network traffic distribution, firewall and network monitoring. All of the virtualized networking and security functions included in NSX can also be self-automated, which also helps reduce the chance for error. Automation helps ensure continuous performance and eliminates the bottlenecks of manually configuring and operating network infrastructure.

Moving to a container architecture has never been easier

Creating a cluster has never been easier. When creating a Kubernetes cluster, all steps are done at once: network, security, load balancing, etc. At the same time, the necessary resources and access policies can be easily defined.

App Launchpad, an add-on service to VMware Cloud Director, also offers hundreds of VMware Marketplace containerized applications validated by VMware that can be installed in seconds. Among them are all well-known applications such as Apache, Nginx, Tomcat, Node.js, Grafana, Jenkins, RabbitMQ, Cassandra, GitHub, various SQL servers, etc. In addition, many other developer tools in the form of various CMSs, CRMs and e-shops.

 

WaveCom AS is a leading provider of cloud platforms for business services and innovation leaders of cloud services in Estonia. The cloud service of WaveCom AS offers all the unlimited possibilities of the VMware software data center, such as vSphere Enterprise Plus level virtualization, Cloud Director cloud service management, VMware Tanzu containers, VMware NSX network solutions, vRealize operation tenant apps, Cloud Availability Disaster Recovery and Veeam backup. WaveCom's services are in constant development in order to constantly offer new functionalities and more convenient management.

WaveCom AS is a VMware Advanced partner and the only VMware Cloud Verified certified service provider in the Baltics. The WaveCom team has 10 VCP - VMware Certified Professional, 2 VCAP - VMware Certified Advanced Professional and VCIX - VMware Certified Implementation Expert certificates and is possibly the most certified VMware team in Estonia.

WaveCom's data center and services meet the ISO 27001:2013 standard for information security.

In WaveCom's innovative data center or cloud service, many companies related to technology, insurance, finance and cyber security that use or offer high-performance IT services host their services.

 

WaveCom AS offers the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Standard Runtime solution for testing for three months free of charge. Get in touch via email at sales@wavecom.ee