VMware Extends Tanzu Reach
VMware, at its online VMworld 2020 conference, today announced it is making the Tanzu platform based on Kubernetes available on VMware Cloud and committed to making available previews of instances of Tanzu running on Google Cloud VMware Engine and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.
In addition, VMware is allying with GitLab to make available a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform available on Tanzu.
VMware also revealed it is extending its Virtual Cloud Network to VMware Tanzu Service Mesh powered by NSX, the network virtualization overlay from VMware. Virtual Cloud Network bundles VMware NSX, VMware SD-WAN by Velocloud and VMware vRealize Network Insight into a single offering.
Finally, VMware announced official support for Project Antrea, an open source project that employs Kubernetes extensions and a data plane based on Open vSwitch (OVS) software to both establish network connections between pods in a cluster and enforce network policies. VMware Container Networking with Antrea is a commercial offering consisting of signed images and binaries. It will also be included in VMware NSX-T, vSphere 7 with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Applications running on Kubernetes clusters using Antrea can be discovered, connected and protected by Tanzu Service Mesh via the Container Networking Interface (CNI) defined by the Technical Oversight Committee for Kubernetes.
VMware claims there are now more than 75 independent software vendors (ISVs) participating in a rapidly growing VMware Tanzu ecosystem. As a result, hundreds of customers are using Tanzu offerings, according to the company, with more than 1 million containers deployed in production environments. VMware also notes every minute 36 new projects are initiated on start.spring.io, a framework for building Java applications. Many of those projects will result in container images that will be deployed on Tanzu platforms via the Bitnami catalog for container images.
Chris Wolf, vice president for the Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware, says regardless of whether Kubernetes is deployed on-premises or in the cloud using virtual machines or bare-metal servers, VMware is committed to enabling organizations to modernize their application portfolio using cloud-native technologies.
Most of those applications, however, will be deployed alongside legacy applications based on monolithic applications that are already deployed on the VMware vSphere platform, he notes. Just about every microservices-based application developed and deployed using Kubernetes will need to be integrated with those legacy applications, which Wolf says creates a compelling case for deploying cloud-native applications based on Kubernetes on top of virtual machines from VMware.
VMware has long touted VMware vSphere as a platform for running Kubernetes. Alternatively, VMware will enable IT teams to manage instances of Tanzu wherever they are deployed. Most recently, VMware restructured its Tanzu portfolio to make its distribution of Kubernetes more accessible.
Regardless of the path forward, VMware is clearly committed to staying relevant by extending its entire portfolio of offerings across Kubernetes clusters, which are being deployed in much larger numbers across the enterprise.
