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Kubernetes Storage in VMware Tanzu
298 Plays3 years ago
In this first episode of season 2, Bhavin and Ryan interview Kenny Coleman a Technical Product Manager at VMWare working with Tanzu. This episode dives into what Tanzu is, how to get started, what day 1 and day 2 solutions there are as well as where to learn more.
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Transcript
Introduction to Kubernetes Bites
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to Kubernetes Bites, a podcast bringing you the latest from the world of cloud native data management. My name is Ryan Walner and I'm joined by Bob and Shaw coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts.
Overview of Episode Content
00:00:14
Speaker
We'll be sharing our thoughts on recent cloud native news and talking to industry experts about their experiences and challenges managing the wealth of data in today's cloud native ecosystem.
00:00:27
Speaker
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are. We're coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts.
Recording Date & New Year Anecdotes
00:00:35
Speaker
Today is January 5th, 2022. Remember, and I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe. Let's dive into it. I don't know about you, Bobbin, but for the first month, I pretty much date everything from last year. So this is a good way to really dive into it for me. It's just it's pushing the last point home that we're in a different year.
00:00:57
Speaker
Speaking of which, what did you
Season Two Launch
00:01:00
Speaker
do? Oh, Happy New Year. Yeah, I know. We made it to season two. This is first episode season two. That's right. Great point. Season two. Welcome, everyone. You've endured season one and we left you off with some really terrible audio, which should be fixed this time. So this is this is good news.
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah.
Holiday Experiences during Omicron
00:01:21
Speaker
So over the break, like I took some time off and then I didn't travel anywhere. I stayed local in Boston, Cambridge and just went to a fruit breweries. I remember us having like an offline discussion about tree house brewing. Yeah. Treehouse brewery. It's like one and a half hours away. Yeah. But then since we had the week off, I was like, OK, let me just make the drive there. I convinced a bunch of friends and we drove down there.
00:01:47
Speaker
had a couple of good beers and then bought almost a case back so good times yeah it's a beautiful location and it is kind of far away but it's in i think it's like west of auburn but um they have sort of one style of beer i feel like if you you like it or you don't i know their artwork on their cans is amazing if you're into that
00:02:09
Speaker
I'm always interested in what they have on there. My only complaint would be just increase the number of beers I can have inside the brewery. Two is just too low. Yeah. I know they've gone through a lot of growing pains. It's better than it was. Lines were crazy before you could even order beforehand. So it just shows you the microbrewery scene, especially in the Northeast. I mean, it's booming everywhere. But maybe a second career. You never know.
00:02:38
Speaker
I don't know. Cool. I stayed pretty much local as well. Not by choice. We usually go to New York, but Omicron, you know, that devil was, you know, running rampant and
00:02:55
Speaker
We were halfway down to New York and had to turn around on the mass pike. And my three-year-old was pumped about that for the ride home. No one was coming back. Neither. On the way there, she had the promise of presents right from Santa on the way back, not so much. So you can imagine how the way back went. But overall, we got to enjoy it here. We had a little bit of a white Christmas, which doesn't happen often, doesn't snow. So that was pretty cool.
00:03:25
Speaker
Other than that, yes, just tried to really sign off this time, as many do over the holidays, but excited to be back in season two here.
Kubernetes 1.23 Release & Storage Features
00:03:38
Speaker
Speaking of season two, we have a minimal amount of news, just because we really haven't been following a ton of it over the holidays. I know that we did tackle the fact that 123 was going to come out in our last podcast in early December, is now out.
00:03:58
Speaker
And there's a lot of things when it comes to storage. You can go listen to the last podcast. We sort of dove into what those things are, what you should pay attention to. And I think you saw a webinar. Could you tell?
00:04:11
Speaker
Yeah, so CNCF, like every release, it basically have the release leads to a webinar talking about the latest enhancements and features introduced in the release. So that went live yesterday. It's on YouTube, we'll obviously have the link in our show notes. Again, if you are just getting started with your year with your week, that's a good place to start on, like, okay, what's happening with the new release and then try to upgrade your clusters.
Guest Introduction: Kenny Coleman from VMware
00:04:37
Speaker
Great. So I think for season two, episode one, we have a great guest speaker today. Kenny Coleman from VMware works on everything Tanzu. I've had the pleasure of working with Kenny when I was at EMC. He was part of EMC codes or the open source kind of group there at EMC before Dell even bought them. Great guy and lots of interesting things to say about Tanzu. So I'm really excited to talk with him.
00:05:06
Speaker
And like, regardless, like he also has another bourbon pursuit podcast, which is again, I'm a big fan. We won't discuss about that in this episode, but that's definitely a follow up conversation with Kenny that I need to have. Yes, we'll link to that as well. Kenny, don't worry. All right. Well, without further ado, let's bring Kenny on the show.
Discussion with Kenny Coleman on Tanzu and Kubernetes
00:05:26
Speaker
All right, so Kenny, welcome to the show, Kubernetes Bites. Really glad to have you on here. So let's start off and tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do for VMware. For sure. And thank you for having me on and letting you tell a little bit about my story, but also about what we're doing at VMware to kind of help accelerate that VI admin story into getting into Kubernetes and everything else to kind of look at this application modernization, whatever kind of buzzwords you want to start throwing at.
00:05:56
Speaker
So I've been a VMware now for a few years, but I've been in the VMware ecosystem now for gosh, I want to say at least I don't even want to date myself, but it's I remember like ESXi like or ESX 3.5 Like that's when I really got into it way way back in the day And I know there's other people out there that said like I've been in way longer than you and that's fine But I think that's that's our our measuring stick right like okay, what ESXi version did you start with? Did you have a vCenter back then?
00:06:28
Speaker
And so that was that was kind of when I got into it. But before then, I was doing a lot of stuff in Cisco networking. But when I saw like vCenter and vSphere, and I guess I don't know if it was vSphere back then, but I remember when seeing virtualization back then, that's when everything kind of flipped for me. And I went all in on doing stuff with VMware. And so I've been in that realm for quite a long time, spoke at my first VMworld. I think it was back in 2010. And then
00:06:51
Speaker
I kind of went off in a little bit different ways. I've actually had a history with Ryan here in the past as well. And part of what it was is I wrote some books on vCloud Director and did a lot of stuff that was kind of more like this kind of like cloud era sort of thing. And then I got to the point where I said I think I've learned as much as I care about learning.
00:07:13
Speaker
of about VMware and virtualization and everything else like this. And this was really the time when there really wasn't else that was being added to the VMware portfolio. I think Cloud Foundry was starting to come in and make some waves and you start touching on it. But I said, what else can I start learning?
00:07:29
Speaker
And this is when we started learning about things such as Chef and Puppet and all the things that we said, all right, now this is sort of like this new DevOps kind of role. And to even get into that, you had to start programming. There's really another way around it. And I had a history. I had a somewhat of a development degree back in college.
00:07:49
Speaker
I didn't really use it much more than my first year after school and i said this sucks i'm never doing this again and it wasn't until few years later when i realize that not everything has to be. With visual basic or all the way down and see plus plus like there's other programming languages that are out there and so i had somebody that i was working with that said.
00:08:08
Speaker
Well, what we're going to do is we're going to build this whole front end to vCloud director all using Rails and all this other kind of stuff. And I said, OK, cool. I'll try to see what I can learn. And that's really what kind of got me under hooked into doing things with inside of just the development's lifecycle. So I started coding a few different things out there, ended up joining a team with inside the walls at EMC at the time called EMC Code. And we were doing a lot of the open source tooling and really what does open source mean to EMC. And that's also when this whole idea of Docker came around.
00:08:38
Speaker
And how do we make Docker relevant to EMC? Well, EMC storage. And now we have a way to have persistent storage with containers and these whole worlds are starting to collide. And so our team was one of the first ones that started creating some of the Docker volume drivers out there when it was still in beta and or maybe even alpha. It wasn't even the official Docker release back then. And
00:09:02
Speaker
At that time, I also took kind of took a different role because we had got us to the point we had a good, good base product. And I kind of hung up my hat and said, I'm a cowboy coder. This is nothing that I'm going to be able to continue doing. Let's hire some real developers now. And so I kind of took on a role as doing some more technical marketing and kind of preaching and evangelizing of really what it is that we're building and how do these worlds kind of start meeting and this is what you should be prepared for.
00:09:27
Speaker
And then all of a sudden this whole idea of kubernetes came around and i was like i really don't know about this will see what's going on i really like docker swarm and then that ended up showing that doesn't really have legs so everybody kinda jumped on the kubernetes train of course a few years ago and and i grabbed on to the train as i started pulling away from the station too and.
00:09:48
Speaker
And so now I've been at VMware for four years now doing nothing but Kubernetes. And it's been a great treat to be there. So I've been able to see the evolution of what once was a pivotal container service now turning into TKGI, the launch of TKG, vSphere with Tanzu, Tanzu companies grid. I mean, you name it, like everything we're doing inside of VMware now within Kubernetes, I have at least some sort of visibility or touch point on. And so that's what I'm doing at VMware now.
00:10:17
Speaker
I think that's one of the main reasons we have you on. We need somebody to help us differentiate and talk about and understand what all of these different Tanzu services are and how, if I'm a VI admin or a developer, these can help me.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, we have a funny saying internally. It's like, who's who in the Tanzu? Because it does. I mean, even for myself, it gets confusing. It's what three-letter acronym do we're going to have this week? I was going to say, we need flashcards, right? Which Tanzu acronym we're going to use this week. Exactly. And so that's just one of those things that the companies continue to grow.
00:10:52
Speaker
there's, of course, there's never going to be end of, of seeing new innovations that are going to happen in the space. And when you see things like even service mesh comes along, you're like, okay, well now we have to have our own service mesh thing. So TSM, how's your service mesh? All right, now we add that to it. So it's just one of those things that we're going to continually see innovation happen and the products are continue to start being brought in as well. That sort of fit the narrative that people are looking for on how they want to build their new applications or build their applications in this new way.
00:11:21
Speaker
Nice, okay, so can we start off with all the acquisitions, with Pivotal, with Heptio, and many in the cloud native security ecosystem, what is now the Danzo portfolio and what are the key aspects, right? Like from a developer perspective or from an operator perspective, I'm a VMware admin, like what are the things that, what are the keywords that I should remember that when I'm talking to my sales rep, I know what to ask for and what to try and install in my environment.
00:11:48
Speaker
Yeah. This is, this is always a fun one because I always, I always try to look at this as, okay, like what, what problem are we trying to solve? And if I am just a user that just wants to get started with Kubernetes, I don't, I, it's, it's hard to figure out where to go because at this point, like we have a few different products that a lot of it does the same exact thing and we want to figure out, well, where should I start or where do I get into this? And if you're a VI admin,
00:12:16
Speaker
And you just want to get started using Kubernetes and whether it's in your own environment or whether it's your own desktop. So there's really two ways I'm going to go with this because there's never one answer. So there's those two ways. The first one I'll say and I'll kind of talk about is kind of the latest project that I've been a part of, which is Tanzu Community Edition. And so this is really going to be your entry level way
00:12:40
Speaker
of having the entire Tanzu portfolio. When I say entire, I mean, it is everything that you would get in Tanzu companies grid, plus everything that we're building on top of it for having stuff that's insight like the application development lifecycle sort of timeframe or framing of this to even having serverless framework to having all this sort of stuff all baked into a single CLI.
00:13:01
Speaker
So super, super simple, super powerful to be able to do something like that. But if you're just getting started and you're like, I don't even know where to start with this, I would say that's one way where you just start, where you create your first clusters, kind of get an idea of, all right, this is what I can do with Kubernetes. This is actually what it does. This is how I deploy my first apps. That's one way to be able to do it.
00:13:24
Speaker
And I'll preface this even one more as saying, if you even want to learn more about that and you're like, I don't even know what a Kubernetes cluster is. What's a control plane? What's a worker plane? What's a deployment? What is all this sort of stuff? Well, go to cube.academy. There's a bunch of free resources on there from some of our own internal team members that teach you all the basics of what it is about Kubernetes. So learn the basics first and then go try to install it. Because if you don't understand the architecture, then none of it's going to make any sort of sense.
00:13:54
Speaker
And then the second way to kind of get yourself into this is that if you are already a VI admin and you're running vSphere 7.0 already, then you have probably gone around, you started clicking around inside the vCenter interface, and you saw this whole thing of workload control plane. And that is what is vSphere at Tanzu. And this is having Tanzu and Kubernetes baked directly inside of vSphere.
00:14:23
Speaker
Now there's a little bit more of a ramp up with this because you have to have NSX Advanced Load Balancer formerly Avi installed and configured. There's a little bit more of an on-ramp to get started with it, but it is the more baked way that you could say that I'm getting a native experience with Kubernetes inside of vSphere today.
00:14:42
Speaker
Awesome. So basically when you deploy a TKG cluster, it runs as virtual machines on your same vSphere cluster, consumes storage from your same VMFS or NFS pack data stores, and just allows your developers to start deploying those containers, right?
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's the great thing about vSphere, right? I mean, this is nothing that we're doing is like just everything in vSphere is always abstracted, right? We just abstract it up and we let another layer take care of it. And so storage is really no difference when we think about that. So with inside of vSphere, you create your volumes.
00:15:16
Speaker
and those are based off of anything that's via more back to anything that's pure back to anything like that you just presented as a data store. To your cluster or to your into the sphere tons or two tons of communication whatever it is it just looks at is a data store all wants to do is consume it and so at that point.
00:15:37
Speaker
you just interact with it you store things for persistent data whether it's databases or anything like that that you wanna make sure survives reboots or any kind of cycles then you can continue going on that path and that's always one thing that i try to tell people is we always get started with.
00:15:54
Speaker
I know Ryan, me and you probably have some flashbacks of this talking about the older x-ray days because we always talked about like, what's the value of Kubernetes or even containers at that point? We always used to show, oh, this is running nginx inside of a container.
00:16:09
Speaker
So I get it, but what can I do with that? Sure. There's going to be a lot of use cases for persistent-less type of applications. But really, persistence at the end of the day is what makes this more of an enterprise type of feature. 90% of applications that we need today are going to have some sort of persistence back behind it at some point. And so you have to be able to figure out how do we make this ubiquitous amongst all the types of applications that we want to run. And it's just not siloed to say, OK, we've got our VMs over here.
00:16:39
Speaker
enterprise storage here. We got our containers over here. You want to kind of put everything into a single way of kind of getting together is really what you're trying to go for here.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah, those are x-ray days. Those are definitely some flashbacks there. And that's the good point, right? Is that no matter where you're running these things, whether you're using containers or in Kubernetes on VMware or not, the end of the day is you really want to be able to run this in an enterprise environment. So I think Tansu does a really good job addressing those things.
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, even with the Portworx integration that we have, we still consume the same data stores. We spin up those VMDK files and aggregate them inside the Tanzu Kubernetes cluster and provide that single storage pool. At the end of the day, if you're a VIA admin, I don't think it will matter if you're running virtual machines or containers, you have the same experience, you have the same constructs going for you.
00:17:39
Speaker
Kenny, next question is around, okay, let's say I'm an advanced user, I know 101, I have deployed TKG, what's next? Like, okay, how do I do backup and restore? And how do I promote these applications to production? Yeah, I mean, that's always, it's day two, right? I mean, we always say like day zero, let's get everything sort of set up in day one. All right, now we kind of got things running, but day two is the
00:18:02
Speaker
Oh crap, like what do we do when something really happens or how do we monitor things? How do we take backup snapshots and all other kind of all that sort of stuff. So I'll throw a few different things at you. So today, like we'll say with inside of tons of community edition, it comes packaged with a whole list of
00:18:19
Speaker
plugins that are deployed through a repository or try to say a package program that we call Carville. And so what that allows us to do is say, Tanzu install XYZ. And so we say Tanzu install Prometheus, Tanzu install Grafana. What's that get us? Well, it gets us a Prometheus and Grafana instance on that Kubernetes cluster. Then we can go and we can monitor exactly what's happening inside of that instance.
00:18:44
Speaker
The other part of this is that you have contour, which is available to us. So if you need some sort of ingress controller, Tanzu install contour, and all of a sudden we have a layer seven ingress controller.
00:18:53
Speaker
But that's just not all. We also do backup and recovery. So Tanzu install Valero. And so I'm sure if you are in this realm for a little bit, you've probably heard of Valero at some point. So Valero is another open source project that came in as a part of the Heptio acquisition. And I believe it was called Arc at the point where it was actually when it came in.
00:19:14
Speaker
And so it's rebranded and now we have Valero which is your open source backup recovery tool and it's actually very simple to be able to use you install it onto the cluster and crazy just and then you create your s3 target s3 is the type of back in storage that needs to be able to talk to.
00:19:32
Speaker
So you say, this is my S3 target. I'm going to go ahead and have this. I'm going to back up not only just the container configuration, but I'm also going to back up the actual data that's running in, say, my data store here. And I'm going to move that into my S3 target. Now I can recover this data not only back into the same cluster, but I could recover into a completely different Kubernetes cluster that could be on the other side of the world. It doesn't really matter. It's just S3. It's just blob storage at the end of the day.
00:20:00
Speaker
So we have that as sort of like an open source tooling that's somewhat baked in. It's part of the CLI. If you want more of a enterprise ready, and what do we always say? Like what's the thing that everybody always looks at? I can click on it. If it's in the GUI, then I know it makes sense. And for a lot of our vSphere people out there, and I'm guilty of it too, like that's, I'm the heavy user and it's like, all right, inside the vCenter interface, this all makes sense. And so if you're very much one of those people,
00:20:28
Speaker
and you like to click on the user interface, then we also have Tanzu Mission Control TMC. There's another three-letter acronym for you while we're doing this. Yeah. Is there anybody keeping a tally so far? I have to. Yeah. So Tanzu Mission Control is not only just a Kubernetes kind of
00:20:47
Speaker
I'm trying to think of the word here. It's not just a Kubernetes management interface, but instead, Tanzu Mission Control is not just look at one Kubernetes cluster, but it could be for tens, hundreds, or thousands of Kubernetes clusters that are running in any type of environment. So whether you have Kubernetes clusters that are running on your local data center or local data centers, and you're running Tanzu Community Edition, you're running Tanzu Critis Grid, you're running VCR Tanzu. Yes, all three of those are different products, and so they
00:21:17
Speaker
kind of do the same thing, but we can all feed that information up back into Tanzu Mission Control. We can also bring in things from, say, AKS or EKS or OpenShift or Rancher. Literally any of those clusters can be brought up and monitored through Tanzu Mission Control.
00:21:32
Speaker
But there is also an integration with Tanzu Mission Control that you have a one button sort of installation experience with Valero. And so you would just go to that cluster and you say, okay, I want to go ahead and have data protection enabled here. You enable it and then you say, all right, do I want to back up the whole entire cluster? Do I want to do just a particular namespace? And you set up the schedule. It's basically just setting up like a cron schedule. You click go and you set up also your S3 endpoint of where it's going to be storing stuff.
00:22:00
Speaker
and you kind of let it go from there so that's those are those are the the two and a half i guess the best way to two options to kind of talk about how do you set up some sort of backup and disaster recovery scenarios with inside of. Are products and you mentioned you know the fact that you can bring in all sorts of different clusters where you're running open shift or.
00:22:21
Speaker
or any other cloud or whether you're running TKG, XYZ in various other clouds. Now, this begs the question is, do you find that people are really using those multi-cloud workflows or are they really focusing in on sort of the, I'll call it classic Tanzu, right, on VMware and vSphere sort of environments?
00:22:43
Speaker
Do you see that happening do you see people getting to that point of pain and i'm tackling these day two problems but i also really want multi cloud and boom there's micha control.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, we see multi-cloud as a big initiative internally. As much as we'd love to say, oh, put everything on your own data center inside of vSphere. Everything's been great. But that's not the reality. The reality is that people are not having multiple data centers anymore for hot and cold storage. They're utilizing cloud resources because it can be cheaper. You're utilizing things like VMC or VMware Cloud on AWS or Azure or anywhere else.
00:23:19
Speaker
to be able to have a same sort of vSphere like environment, but in a cloud scenario too. And so we are taking a big focus on making sure that we are providing the best experience possible when you want to start moving into a multiple cloud type of journey here.
00:23:37
Speaker
And so, of course, Tanzi Mission Control is going to be one of those tools that allows you to visualize everything from that perspective because it doesn't matter what type of Kubernetes cluster it's running on or the type of environment we can be able to monitor and manage it as well. But when we look at things like Tanzi Community Edition as well as Tanzi Community Grid, these are products that are cross-cloud compatible.
00:23:58
Speaker
So not only can we just provision them on vSphere, but you can provision your Kubernetes clusters onto native cloud architectures such as AWS and Azure. So we want to make sure we enable that to kind of fulfill that journey and fulfill that need. Meaning that you have one tool that you can run across any type of support infrastructure that you're looking to bring into your fold there. And so one way to be able to do that
00:24:24
Speaker
say with tons of companies grid. So we create our management cluster in both vSphere as well as AWS. And then after we create our management cluster in both of those particular clouds, then we can deploy our worker nodes or sorry, our worker clusters into each one of them as well. So we have the same type of
00:24:42
Speaker
architecture going into each of this sort of like managed cluster type of architecture. But then we are managing it, like I said, but we're managing it sort of, should I say the architecture is the same. There's really nothing independent about it. But we're also monitoring it from a very global level, the same way as well. So you kind of get a uniform way of how you package and how you deploy Kubernetes across any type of cloud. And again, this is really one big sticking point we're going to probably see going into 2022.
00:25:11
Speaker
is that we're going to have a lot of focus, just not on vSphere anymore. But instead, we want to help embrace more clouds, like how can we bring in people that are utilizing Google Cloud Azure, because we all know that
00:25:25
Speaker
It's one of those things that you start calling and talking to customers and they say, we were just given 40,000 free hours from Microsoft for doing this. We want to start testing here. Sure, go ahead, test it. Our tools work with it too. Please go ahead. And that's just one of those things that we want to make sure that we enable customers to kind of have that platform of choice. And we still want to provide the tooling to make it the best possible experience as well.
00:25:48
Speaker
Yeah, and the thing that I like about transformation control is it's a SAS based service, right? So I don't need to deploy anything. I don't need to maintain the management layer. I can just create an account and start adding my clusters and managing them and monitoring them.
00:26:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny, you know, when we first started launching Tanzu Mission Control, I couldn't tell you how many people internally said, so when's the on-premise version going to come? Where's the OVA? And there was kind of like this sort of time when it said, do we really want to do this or do we do this?
00:26:19
Speaker
Should we keep an OVA? Should we just keep it SAS? Then there was finally an executive thing that said, no, we're going to take a SAS-only approach to this. And it's been a good way to look at it because it allows us to be able to focus on the service and make it super robust, make it super scalable, making sure that we can take care of anything that would be
00:26:41
Speaker
from a security perspective for, you know, multiple users and like, how does one person see this, but no, nobody else uses this. So that sort of multi-tenancy approach, it's been super valuable in seeing exactly how we've been able to make this a SaaS only offering and being able to keep the rate of pace of innovation as well as any concerns that people would need. Because if you think if you were to do that from not only just a SaaS perspective, but also
00:27:07
Speaker
coming out with a binary that somebody has to go and update and then you have to worry about updates and my update failed. How do I roll back? There's a whole other process. It's not just technology. It's just the processes behind it that take up a lot of time that would have to go into it. So now we can focus more on the innovation side of things and bringing in new things like
00:27:27
Speaker
We just launched Tanzu Package Manager TPM. I think it's another one, so put another tally on. And so it's kind of like what Tanzu Community Edition does, where you can say, I'm going to go ahead and install these binaries, these packages that are
00:27:45
Speaker
they are supported by VMware. And I should mention that when I was talking about Prometheus and Grafana and all those other kind of things. If you're utilizing TKG and you utilize Prometheus and Grafana, like VMware supports that. Like you can come with a Prometheus and Grafana question and we can help support and troubleshoot that.
00:28:02
Speaker
And so now with Tanzu Mission Control and its package manager, we're going to see some more alignment between the different package managers now, because there's a few of them, to say like, okay, who owns what? And if I'm installing it here, is it going to reconcile over here? You're going to see a lot of that coming 2022 as well.
00:28:18
Speaker
Nice. I'm also excited about, I think it's called Tanzu Mission Control Starter Edition or something like that. Like I know it was announced with Community Edition where we can, I can get a free account for a few clusters, right? That is correct. So yes, again, you can look at that coming in 2022. So Tanzu Mission Control Starter Edition is, it's exactly as it sounds like. So it is a, I don't want to say stripped down version. It's not really stripped down, but it's a more,
00:28:43
Speaker
I guess you could say like it doesn't open the floodgates of how many clusters you can have and different types of targets and all this other kind of stuff. So it is a way that we look as for people to get started like tons of community edition is your easy way to say I've now got a CLI, I can provision a cluster to my own laptop, I can provision a cluster to vSphere, to AWS, to Azure.
00:29:08
Speaker
And after I start messing with that, and I know exactly, OK, I understand the basics here. I can deploy some apps. I can deploy some of these day two operations applications that I need to get started. But what after that? What if I have 10 of these? If I have 10 clusters, what do I do? Well, that's really where Tanzu, Mission Control, Starter Edition comes in to give you a taste of what it is to monitor and manage stuff as it starts to scale.
00:29:35
Speaker
And so TMC Starter Edition is going to be that sort of gateway to kind of get you into the door saying, all right, this is how you can start looking at it. And this is what it looks like. And by the way, using TMC is super simple.
00:29:49
Speaker
All it is, is it's a one-liner. Like if you're going through and you're going and deploying your clusters already, you can actually embed it, like the one-liner into your deployment and it'll automatically be added to TMC. But if you already have your clusters that have been created, you just go into Tanzu Mission Control and you say, oh, I want to bring in a new cluster. And it gives you a kubectl apply. It's a one-liner, you just copy it. Now I say one-liner, but it's probably like 1,000 characters. And you can paste that into your,
00:30:20
Speaker
into your command prompt. And after a few minutes, what it's going to do is it's going to start installing all of the tools that are necessary to talk to tons of control, to send diagnostic data, all that sort of stuff, health monitoring and alerting. And in a few minutes, you'll be able to see that inside a tons of control, you can visualize the healthier cluster. And you can see exactly what's happening with it. What are the workloads that are running without having to sit there and keep cuddle around to figure out what's going on with it. You can just visualize that with inside the UI.
00:30:49
Speaker
So do I need multiple ports open from my on-prem cluster to transformation controls endpoint, or is it just like everything is over 443? So we do have some documentation out there. I can't get into it, because I don't really know. For me, my environments, I'm like, ah, open it up, whatever. OK.
00:31:06
Speaker
You know, if you're running production, I would definitely say just take a look at it. We do have a lot of documentation out there that says if there's something that needs to be opened up or what has to has to communicate over it. You probably so far, really, mostly everything that I've seen is over 443. So but again, make sure you read the documentation for any other kind of questions. Don't take this podcast as gospel. Yes.
00:31:29
Speaker
Okay, I think since you're talking about 2022, another announcement that I'm excited about is Tanzu Application Platform. I know it's still in beta. Can you share what it is? How it up-levels services that we are already using? How it makes lives easier for our administrators?
00:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm not going to be the best person to talk about it because there's another person on my team that owns the entire thing, but I'll give you my little synopsis of it. So yeah, so Tanzu Application Platform, this is sort of moving on to sort of the next phase of what we're going to be seeing with inside the Tanzu Kubernetes adoption cycle.
00:32:04
Speaker
So first is we have basically what my team is responsible for is we take care of the infrastructure, the setup, like what do we need to actually make sure that we have a production-ready Kubernetes instance that we can run everything on top of. After that, it's sort of, well, what's the next level? Well, people that are going to be consuming the service or consuming Kubernetes, and that's really where the Tanzu application platform comes in.
00:32:27
Speaker
So today, there's a lot of things that are being built and baked into it. And a lot of these were coming from, say, the pivotal era kind of days as well. So you're going to see a lot of things that are really important to developers, and what do developers need to make themselves more productive, as well as having a better toolset to get their job done as well.
00:32:47
Speaker
And once we're going to start seeing this come in GA, hopefully relatively soon, I can't say specific dates or anything like that. But this is going to give you that opportunity to kind of have a more streamlined experience. Because one of the things that we've always seen that's been very difficult, and not just, of course, these products, but most of our products is the difficulty of installation. Like sometimes installation can be very, very tough. So when we have this bait into the side of the Tonzi portfolio,
00:33:14
Speaker
having the ability to say there and deploy the application platform becomes a lot easier because we can say Tanzu install X, Tanzu install, whatever. And so we're going to make that installation experience a lot easier, especially when it comes to the Tanzu Community Edition side. And I want to give too much away, but we are looking at bringing in a lot of the TAP components into Community Edition as well.
00:33:36
Speaker
Perfect. So you get, as I said, we want to throw everything at you. We want to get you the ability to kind of see things and understand really like this is what the platform is capable of. And by being able to bake a lot of that into the community edition, you really get an idea of what is reality, like what is possible here, what can be done.
00:33:55
Speaker
And so the community edition is going to kind of be that stepping stone that's going to get you into the ability to start doing that, start playing with it, not only just in the infrastructure side, but as well as the development aspect of it as well.
00:34:08
Speaker
Okay, so I guess that's the next step, right? Like just have people download community edition and start playing with it. That's a good segue to my last question. Again, Ryan, feel free to add more. But from me, I guess, where can people find more information, right? Okay, what do they need to keep an eye out for? How can they find more about anything that starts with Tanzu?
00:34:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's so much stuff that comes out every week. I mean, we all know that this space is rapidly evolving. And I've been in the space now, Ryan, as I know as well for the past few years. And what we were talking about three years ago is pretty much obsolete and outdated. So we're continually trying to
00:34:46
Speaker
innovate and try to stay up with the change of pace of what's been happening. I will say one of the greatest things that I have been able to see, I was a part of the Kubernetes release team from, I think it was 1.12 through 1.16. I was on the Kubernetes release teams for that. And that was also in a time of heavy sort of flow of like, okay, we're going to have a new release every single quarter. And we're starting to see that slow down now. It's starting to tail off. We start seeing the
00:35:10
Speaker
the stability of the program really start coming out, which I think is great from an enterprise adoption as well as a mass market level adoption as well. And so that's kind of where we're waiting is to see exactly like, okay, now we're continuing to keep up with the rate of pace of change of Kubernetes. And we want to make sure that that adoption cycle isn't something that is going to scare customers away either.
00:35:34
Speaker
So we will continually keep bringing in newer versions of Kubernetes into our release trains. So you'll have tons of Kubernetes grid for 1.22 and 1.23 and 1.24 and so on and so on until, you know, well, hopefully forever keeping the what in minus two or in minus whatever sort of support scenario.
00:35:53
Speaker
But if you do want to keep up with what's happening inside of the Tanzu room as well, make sure you continue to follow the VMware Tanzu Twitter account. There's constantly posting things that are happening on the Tanzu blog, because the Tanzu blog, I think, gets one to two articles posted every day or two. And so that is one way that we are continually trying to push out more information. And whether that's coming from my team, or that's coming from another team that's on the TAP side of things, or whether it's coming from another application team, or another
00:36:23
Speaker
Tanzu XY three letter acronym coming out of here. That's going to give you another ability to kind of see that as well.
00:36:31
Speaker
There was another portal that just came up, the Tanzu Developer Portal or Tanzu Development Center. I might have to Google that one, but go and check that out. It is a way to get started with Tanzu Committee's grid, Tanzu Community Edition, sort of just like the Tanzu CLI, all inside your web browser. And so you get an idea of basically what it looks like to stand up a cluster, interact with a cluster without actually having to own your own infrastructure. So the
00:36:59
Speaker
The cluster may not be real, but the commands that you are issuing are very much real. And so you get a sort of real-life scenario aspect with it as well. So make sure you check out those two. And of course, there's going to be all kinds of great conferences coming up this year. So we've got KubeCon. We've got VMware. There's VMugs. I mean, you name it, there's going to be a huge push on everything Tanzu and multi-cloud operations. And that's what you're going to see a lot coming out of VMware in this next year.
00:37:26
Speaker
Awesome. And I Googled it for you. It's Tanzu Development Center. There you go. I appreciate it. Tanzu VMware.com slash developer. We'll include it in the show notes as well. I think the only thing I'd add, Bob, and since we focus on a lot of storage topics, I know something that's come up in our conversations with both internally and with customers is the concept of supervisor services and the vSAN data persistence platform.
00:37:54
Speaker
And so one of the things that often comes up is, well, OK, these things like Minayo and Cloudian and those kind of things run on these supervisor services. And many of the other clusters can now consume those things.
00:38:08
Speaker
One of the questions we have is, why run things there versus on the individual cluster? But then also, is there a future for supervisor services? Are you guys planning to expand in that realm to really onboard other third parties? And what sort of concepts do you often talk about when you're looking at those two things?
00:38:31
Speaker
Yeah. So when you think about those particular services, this was an architectural decision that was made long before I was ever involved with it. And whether you call it tech debt or what do you call it hitting the bulls eye in the first way, I couldn't, I couldn't tell you. And so really what we're looking at is a few different things and I'll kind of share a little bit of sort of inside of like what's happening in regards of like where are these products going and what do they look like?
00:38:56
Speaker
So today, as I mentioned, you have sort of VC or Tanzu and you have Tanzu Kubernetes grid. Both of them accomplished literally the same exact thing, the same type of architecture. They're using cluster API underneath the covers, except Tanzu Kubernetes grid is more aligned with the open source side of things with cluster API versus VC or Tanzu kind of
00:39:18
Speaker
it takes it and it customizes it a lot for its particular use case. And so one of the things that you're going to see is like Tonsi grantees grid, the ability to utilize and deploy a management cluster from from there into vCenter is going to be sort of
00:39:35
Speaker
demoted a little bit and more in favor of everything that's happening inside of vSphere 7 with the supervisor cluster. And this is, again, this is a way that it was picked a long time ago and figured out exactly how are they going to make this happen.
00:39:51
Speaker
with everything with VMware, you're going to see the ability to kind of start making more partners available into it, whether it's through different types of plugins or through different types of services that you can register to it. And yes, of course, today you have things like MinIO, that's part of the supervisor cluster services. But even with that, is it necessarily universal? Like even with that, it's only available on VMware cloud. And it's not really on your basic install experience, it's happening inside of vSphere. So there are some things that are
00:40:21
Speaker
hindered or should I say that are constrained by the type of environment that it's running in. But I can't give you a great answer on really like what's going to happen in regards of like, are we going to have more services that we can interact with or can we can we
00:40:37
Speaker
can we talk to against that particular API? I haven't been super involved with that team in the past six months, but everything that we do inside of VMware, the way that it's always going is trying to figure out how do we integrate with everybody if possible, and how do we make sure that any of these services can play with the most people and give people the greatest amount of choice as well.
00:40:57
Speaker
Yeah, it makes sense. And I think that's just something that we're obviously following all the time. I know Bhavan's done actually a lot of work with Tanzu lately, so he's done a lot more than I have and actually been hands-on with Tanzu. It's a really exciting space. And like you said, it's changing every day, every week. I know when we go on your documentation, it's like, oh, that didn't say that last week.
00:41:22
Speaker
That's a new acronym. What's this, right? But it's exciting. And I think it just shows the sort of the maturity of the market and where we're at with everything and some good stuff coming from VMware and Tanzu, of course. I know I learned a lot today and I hope our listeners learned a lot from you today, Kenny. Is there any last tidbits or nuggets you want to share with our listeners?
00:41:45
Speaker
No, I mean, I kind of told everybody where to start looking for new announcements and everything like that. We've got a lot of cool stuff that's in store for 2022 and a lot of content we're going to be putting out there as well. My team is in charge of content creation for a lot of things that's happening on the Tanzu Community's Grid, VCU Tanzu, Tanzu Community Edition, Tanzu Mission Control, let's see, TKGI. So there's a lot of things that my team is responsible for. So just look for a lot of cool content that'll be coming here the next few months in this year. Really excited for it.
00:42:16
Speaker
Awesome. Well, it's great to have you on, Kenny, and I appreciate it. Thank you again, guys.
00:42:22
Speaker
Well, Bob, and I think I learned a lot from Kenny, from our discussion, lots going on in the Tanzu VMware realm. I'm going to have to tally the amount of times we use an acronym, actually, for sure, afterwards. But I'm going to guess in just this 20-minute conversation, we're upwards of 10, at least. I know. Like, we needed to, like, officially play buzzword bingo or, like, name bingo or something like that with every Tanzu product that's out there. It might help. It might help. Yeah.
00:42:52
Speaker
That was a great conversation, learning about all the different Tanzu offerings, how it can help existing VMware customers. The thing that I loved was it's easy to get started. If you're talking about on-prem Tanzu, Tanzu Community Edition, great way to get started with everything that Tanzu has to offer, including all the different open source projects that Kenny mentioned, including Valero and Prometheus and Grafana, etc.
00:43:17
Speaker
If you're talking about Tanso Mission Control, if you need to manage these free open source clusters that you're deploying, sign up for the Tanso Mission Control starter edition beta. So a great way to get started if you are already in the VMware ecosystem with Kubernetes, it's an easy lift. So hopefully this episode helps.
00:43:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And a couple of the show links that we'll have available that Kenny mentioned was cube.academy. Very easy to remember, but a lot of one on one content how to get started. I think we're a fan of that on the show here because we often talk about sort of very specific types of
00:43:52
Speaker
problems of the Kubernetes ecosystem, but the reality is a lot of those core concepts are going to remain the same in Tanzu, EKS, Azure, wherever you're running your Kubernetes clusters. And I also think that something worth calling out and that I learned during this conversation is Tanzu is agnostic to the data stores underneath it. Coming from a storage perspective here on this podcast, that gives you the ultimate flexibility to choose your workflow
00:44:20
Speaker
for your stateful applications. And when it comes to day two operations, utilize the tools that VMware has, or build on what Kubernetes has to offer. So lots and lots to learn there. I know I have a lot more to learn than you do, Tanzu-wise. I love to get my hands on it pretty soon.
00:44:40
Speaker
And with that, we will close this show. As a reminder, please feel free to send us a message on Anchor or review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast that allows you to review us and let us know what you want to hear, the good, the bad, the ugly.
00:45:02
Speaker
And we will be on the show in a couple of weeks. Bhavan and I will be talking about distributed databases. And so we haven't decided exactly which ones we're going to talk about, but we'll leave that for you to listen to in a couple of weeks. And with that, everyone, take care. Thank you for listening to the Kubernetes Bites podcast.