VMware Simplifies Management of Kubernetes Environments

At the VMware Explore 2023 conference, VMware today unveiled a VMware Tanzu Application Engine, available in beta, that makes it simpler to scale applications and ensure high availability of cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes clusters.

In addition, VMware previewed a chatbot that uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify the management of Kubernetes clusters. Dubbed VMware Tanzu with Intelligent Assist, the chatbot provides a natural language interface to access multiple large language models (LLMs) deployed on the Azure AI cloud service provided by Microsoft. Those models have been trained by VMware using Tanzu documentation.

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VMware also added a VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, available in beta, and VMware Tanzu Insights tools coming this quarter that make use of machine learning algorithms to, respectively, rightsize Kubernetes clusters in a way that optimizes costs and troubleshoots IT environments.

At the same time, VMware is adding a VMware Tanzu Guardrails governance tool to enforce policies across clusters deployed on cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft and a VMware Tanzu Transformer tool for migrating legacy applications to Kubernetes clusters.

VMware is also adding a developer portal, based on the open source Backstage software, that automates the deployment of curated application templates along with support for the latest version of Spring Framework, Spring Boot, .NET Core support and deeper integrations with integrated development environments (IDEs).

Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager for the Modern Apps and Management Business Group at VMware, said the management capabilities being added to the VMware portfolio are enabled by integrating the Aria cloud management platform that VMware launched last year with the existing Tanzu for Kubernetes management platform.

In effect, VMware is expanding the scope of its application platform to now bring networking, container networking and container compute together via a runtime that automatically scales, she added.

As a result, IT teams will be able to use VMware Tanzu Application Engine to define requirements in a curated Application Space that automatically and continuously enforces them at runtime across clusters running different distributions of Kubernetes, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) from Microsoft.

VMware provides its own distribution of Kubernetes—in addition to enabling IT teams to manage other distributions of Kubernetes—but it’s not clear how many organizations are running VMware’s distribution. But it’s clear that, in addition to managing one or more distributions of Kubernetes, many organizations are now managing multiple versions of Kubernetes, as well—in some cases, those reach all the back to Kubernetes 1.12. In theory, only the latest three versions of Kubernetes are officially supported by the Technical Oversight Committee, but many organizations are hesitant to upgrade clusters for fear of eliminating an application programming interface (API) dependency and breaking an application.

Hopefully, as it becomes simpler to upgrade Kubernetes clusters at scale, the number of organizations running outdated versions of the platform will steadily decline.