VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid provides organizations with a unified Kubernetes environment ready to integrate end-user applications and different ecosystems. TKG Standard Runtime is a key part of the VMware Tanzu portfolio of services.
What is Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG)?
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid provides a Kubernetes platform developed and supported by VMware. With Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, you can deploy Kubernetes clusters in VMware software-defined data centers and various public cloud environments. For example, VMware Tanzu is supported by AWS, Azure and Google. TKG enables Kubernetes clusters to be made available to users worldwide as a utility, much like electricity in a power grid.
TKG Standard Runtime is primarily aimed at end users and developers and offers an advanced feature set with simplified cluster lifecycle management. Users can now create, update, delete and resize K8 clusters through GUI or API user interface. It makes everyday tasks easier and faster than ever before. As an additional improvement, users have the opportunity to scale clusters quickly and flexibly, for example by adding servers or increasing the capacity of existing servers from the same platform. To satisfy the corresponding demand, this activity can also be automated using the Cluster API command, which saves time and effort in manual allocation of resources.
TKG Standard Runtime is high-availability, i.e. it offers multi-node management and worker clusters. All TKG components such as cluster virtual machines, network services (including load balancers and firewall) and Named disk Persistent Volumes are installed in a VMware Cloud virtual data center that can be managed in Cloud Director.
When installing a cluster or service/container, automation creates network services such as load balancer and firewall based on NSX-T and AVI LB resources. The VMware CSI interface provisions the necessary Persistent disks, for which the Named Disk functionality is used.
Clusters that host workloads with various functional requirements can now be configured with services/packages to make it user ready, saving considerable operational time and effort. With Tanzu core packages pre-installed for creating TKG clusters reduces additional configuration requirements to provide user-ready TKG clusters. TKG standard runtime is now available to all Cloud Providers, included in the Flex core; these additional packages include Harbor (registry), Antera & Calico (container networking), Fluent Bit (log processing), HAProxy (proxy/loadbalancer), Contour (ingress container), Prometheus (metrics), Grafana (metrics visualization) and Velero (backup, that incidentally, works with Cloud Director Object Storage Extension targets).
In addition, Cloud Director's App Launchpad add-on service offers hundreds of VMware Marketplace containerized applications validated by VMware that can be installed in seconds.
By the end of 2022, another long-awaited functionality will be ready. VMware OSE, or object storage extension, which, in addition to the S3 service and graphical file manager, also enables backup and recovery of Kubernetes clusters.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is free – meaning there are no additional costs other than the usual costs for resources such as vCPU, vRAM and storage. For more information about Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters, we recommend checking out the TKG documentation.
Tanzu SaaS control service Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) can be used for an additional fee. TMC offers Multi-Cloud support and allows you to control and manage K8 clusters located in different environments around the world. TMC also includes Data Protection, Policy Management and Observability/Monitoring.
WaveCom offers the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Standard Runtime solution for free for 3 months for testing.