VMware Adds Self-Hosted Edition of Tanzu Control Plane
VMware has made available an edition of its Tanzu control plane for Kubernetes clusters that IT teams can deploy themselves in an on-premises IT environment or in a public cloud.
John Dwyer, director of product management for Tanzu Mission Control, said the self-hosted edition of the control plane provides IT organizations with an alternative to the current software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of the platform. Existing VMware customers that have made extensive investments in on-premises IT environments—in addition those operating in heavily regulated industries—still prefer to deploy a control plane in an IT environment they control, he noted.
In addition, many of those organizations are now contending with data sovereignty laws that require them to store data in an IT environment located in a specific geographic region.
VMware created VMware Tanzu Mission Control to manage both its Tanzu distribution of Kubernetes alongside other distributions of Kubernetes. About half of VMware’s customers are deploying Kubernetes clusters in cloud computing environments, while the other half are still managing instances of Kubernetes deployed in on-premises IT environments, said Dwyer.
In effect, within most organizations, IT spans multiple types of instances of multi-cloud computing, he added.
It’s not clear whether organizations will ever be able to centralize the management of multiple clouds, but as more cloud-native applications built using microservices are deployed, IT is becoming more complex. Today’s IT environments are generally a mix of one or more cloud computing environments managed alongside on-premises IT environments. Each of those environments is running a mix of legacy monolithic applications deployed on virtual machines alongside cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes clusters and serverless computing frameworks.
In theory, at least, as more artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are applied to IT operations (AIOps) it should become feasible for IT teams to manage those environment at greater scale, but the pace at which cloud-native applications are being deployed is currently exceeding the rate of AIOps adoption. The end result is that IT teams need to master multiple control planes to manage platforms deployed in both the cloud and in on-premises IT environments.
That issue may be coming to a head, however. In the face of ongoing economic headwinds, more organizations are concerned about the total cost of IT. The only way to rein in those costs is to invest in automation frameworks that make it easier to manage IT platforms. VMware Tanzu Mission Control, for example, makes it possible to configure groups of clusters based on a single YAML artifact that is integrated within a GitOps workflow. However, organizations need to invest in this type of platform first before they can enjoy the financial benefits of that investment later on.
Regardless of how organizations approach IT management, the current level of complexity is not going to be reduced anytime soon. However, with careful planning, increased reliance on automation and continued centralization, it should become easier to keep the total cost of IT under some degree of control.
