VMware Tanzu

What is VMware Tanzu?

VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of products and services designed to help organizations build, manage, and run modern applications on Kubernetes-based infrastructure in a supported manner across on-premises, cloud and edge infrastructure. It is part of VMware's efforts to provide tools and solutions for organizations looking to embrace cloud-native application development and containerization technologies.

VMware acquired many of the technologies within Tanzu via the acquisition of Pivotal in December 2019.

Key components and features of VMware Tanzu include:

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG): TKG is a Kubernetes distribution that simplifies the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters across multiple cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure. It provides a consistent and secure Kubernetes experience.
Tanzu Mission Control: Tanzu Mission Control is a centralized management platform that allows organizations to manage and operate multiple Kubernetes clusters across different environments (public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises) from a single console.
Tanzu Application Service (TAS, formerly Pivotal Cloud Foundry): This platform provides a cloud-native application runtime environment for developers to build, deploy, and scale applications quickly. It supports various programming languages and provides features like auto-scaling and load balancing. Tanzu Cloud Foundry is a certified, commercial implementation of the open-source Cloud Foundry platform.
VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly known as VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront): Aria is a monitoring and observability platform offering full-stack visibility using metrics, traces, and logs, across distributed applications, application services, container services, and multi-cloud based on public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructures.
Tanzu Build Service: This tool automates the building and packaging of container images, making it easier for developers to create and maintain containerized applications.
Tanzu Service Mesh: Tanzu Service Mesh provides features like traffic management, security, and observability for microservices-based applications running on Kubernetes.
Tanzu SQL: Tanzu SQL is a service that enables organizations to run and manage relational databases on Kubernetes, making it easier to deploy and scale databases alongside containerized applications.
Tanzu Application Engine: Announced as a private beta in August 2023. Some information is available: Designing VMware Tanzu Application Engine to Increase Collaboration, App Velocity, and Compliance.

VMware Tanzu applications and use cases

One of the best ways to grasp the use cases Tanzu suits is to explore the VMware case studies available on the VMware website, see: Why Tanzu | VMware Tanzu and Customers | VMware Tanzu.

Broadly, VMware Tanzu is well-suited for developing and deploying a wide range of applications, but particularly those that can benefit from cloud-native practices, microservices architecture, and containerization. Here are five common types of applications that are particularly well-suited to VMware Tanzu and often seen:

Web and Mobile Applications: Modern web and mobile applications can leverage Tanzu's capabilities for containerization and microservices to enable agility, scalability, and faster development and deployment. Tanzu helps developers create and manage APIs and services efficiently.
E-Commerce and Retail Platforms: E-commerce and retail applications often experience fluctuating traffic, especially during sales events and holidays. Tanzu's auto-scaling capabilities ensure that these applications can handle the increased demand while managing infrastructure costs effectively.
IoT and Real-time Data Applications: Applications dealing with Internet of Things (IoT) data and real-time event processing can benefit from Tanzu's scalability and event-driven architecture. It supports processing and analyzing large volumes of data efficiently, making it suitable for use cases like smart cities, sensor networks, and industrial IoT.
Financial Services and Fintech Applications: Financial services applications, including trading platforms, online banking, and payment processing, require high availability, security, and compliance. Tanzu provides the necessary infrastructure for secure, resilient, and efficient financial applications.
Healthcare and Life Sciences Applications: Healthcare and life sciences applications, such as electronic health records (EHR) systems, genomics research, and telemedicine platforms, can leverage Tanzu for secure data management, scalability, and real-time analytics, ensuring the highest standards of data security and privacy.

These application types are particularly suited to VMware Tanzu due to its ability to handle the demands of modern, dynamic, and cloud-native application development and deployment. Tanzu provides the tools and infrastructure necessary to ensure applications are agile, scalable, and efficient in serving users and customers.

The relationship between VMware Tanzu and vSphere

The relationship between vSphere and Tanzu can be understood as follows:

vSphere is VMware's virtualization platform and hypervisor. It provides the foundation for virtualized infrastructure by allowing multiple virtual machines (VMs) to run on a single physical server. vSphere was historically, primarily focused on virtualization, abstracting and managing physical hardware resources, such as CPU, memory, storage, and networking, and creating a pool of resources that VMs can use. VMware have added capabilities into vSphere to expand its coverage to running containers and containerized workloads.
Tanzu, on the other hand, is VMware's platform for modern application development and management. It is centered around Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native practices. Tanzu includes various products and services like Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), Tanzu Application Service (formerly Pivotal Cloud Foundry), Tanzu Mission Control, and Tanzu Observability, which collectively support the entire application lifecycle.

VMware Tanzu Basic edition essentially embeds Kubernetes into the VMware vSphere control plane. It is offered as part of the existing VMware vSphere infrastructure and allows existing VMware vSphere users to setup and manage Kubernetes using their existing vSphere tools and employee skills avoiding the challenges of deploying Kubernetes from scratch. Other premium editions offer multi and hybrid-cloud options and wider functionality from the broader Tanzu portfolio.

A decent accessible yet detailed overview is available from VMware technology partner, BDRSuite, see: VMware Tanzu Editions - BDRSuite. Another good, simplified community overview is given in - Tanzu Editions - A Clear explanation - Terasky. Of course, you should always do due diligence in verifying third-party sites and also bear in mind that as VMware actively develops Tanzu, information may become out-of-date.

One complication is that various versions of Tanzu can run different versions of the TKG, i.e., different versions of Kubernetes. Some helpful explanation from the community is again available, see Comparing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid offerings | viktorious.nl – All things cloud-native.

VMware Tanzu monitoring

When monitoring VMware Tanzu, there are several key considerations to ensure the health, performance, and security of your containerized applications and infrastructure. Here are five important considerations:

Comprehensive Observability: Ensure that your monitoring strategy encompasses the entire Tanzu environment, including the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters, applications, and underlying infrastructure. This requires monitoring not only the performance of individual clusters but also application-level metrics and logs. You will also want coverage of the underlying VMware stack and hardware or cloud infrastructures.
Kubernetes Metrics and Events: Collect and analyze Kubernetes-specific metrics, logs and events. Monitor resources like pods, services, and nodes to understand the behavior of your workloads. Pay close attention to Kubernetes events, such as pod scheduling and scaling activities.
Application Performance and Health: Monitor the performance and health of your containerized applications. This includes tracking application response times, error rates, and resource consumption. APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools can help with application-specific metrics.
Security and Compliance: Implement security monitoring and compliance checks. Look for signs of security breaches, unauthorized access, or non-compliance with security policies. Ensure that your Tanzu setup adheres to VMware’s best practice security advice. Ensure that your monitoring tools cover access and authentication technologies.
Alerting and Incident Response: Set up proactive alerting based on thresholds and conditions. Monitoring tools with AIOps technologies will auto-deploy and intelligently baseline your applications and infrastructure to provide automated anomaly detection. Create incident response procedures to address issues swiftly when alerts are triggered. Implement automation for remediation when possible.