From my experience Kubernetes is complex and not just from an architecture perspective in getting clusters deployed and managed, but also for day 2.

From the onset you need to decide if you want to create separate clusters or make use of namespaces. If you choose namespaces then you need to think about Pod Security Policies and Network Policies to isolate the namespaces properly and the list goes on and on.

Kubernetes provides a platform to seamlessly run containers on your laptop, across on-premise data centers and on public cloud providers.  But to create an enterprise ready environment you need to tap into different OSS solutions, adding to the complexity, for IAM, Config, Policies, backup/recovery, ingress etc. 

VMware is looking to solve these day-1 and day-2 problems with their new product launches.  To better understand these new products and how they will be used, let’s break down K8s into different areas:

• Provisioning K8s clusters

  • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid can create K8s clusters in different infrastructures like AWS, Azure, GCP, Edge or VMC on AWS.
  • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is also embedded in vSphere so VI admins can deploy K8s clusters from vCenter Server natively on ESXi hosts!
    • This requires VCF 4

• Running K8s clusters

  • This consists of vSphere with Kubernetes (aka Project Pacific), which transforms vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform.

• Managing K8s clusters.

  • Tanzu Mission Control provides lifecycle management for K8s clusters from a single point of control.

• Provisioning and managing/monitoring containers

  • Tanzu Application Catalog brings the Bitnami catalog of open-source solutions directly to your enterprise.
  • Tanzu Observability provides monitoring of you applications deployed as either VMs or containers.

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