Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations: Products and Components

The primary goal of this course is to give you a good high-level view of the main products and components that make up VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, and how they fit together.

You are not expected to become an expert in any of these components by the end of the course. These products are all significantly complex in their own right. You should, however, have an appreciation of what each of them does, and how they might be used by customers.

It is also a goal of this course that you should be able apply what you have learned to understanding the TKO Reference Architecture. That will, however, also require some understanding of the cloud platforms onto which TKO will be deployed. Those — completely vital — components of the overall solution are beyond the scope of this course.

This course brings together material from a variety of sources. For this reason, they are at different levels of detail and there may be some duplication of topics between the lessons.

While most of the lessons contain video content, there are usually links to additional information at the bottom of each lesson page. Please make sure you scroll down to see these.

As you go through the course some questions to bear in mind might be:

• How does this build on base Kubernetes and networking functions?
• What value does this product or component specifically add?
• What kind of customer problems have I seen that this might solve?
• Why might I choose not to use this component?
• What else do I need to learn about to understand this component better?

Review the TKO website linked below. Wait to take the Test Drive as we'll explicitly do that in a lesson later on in this course.

VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid provides organizations with a consistent, upstream-compatible, regional Kubernetes substrate that is ready for end-user workloads and ecosystem integrations. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is central to many of the offerings in the VMware Tanzu portfolio, and is a key part of the VMware Tanzu Basic, Tanzu Standard, and Tanzu Advanced Editions.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid builds on trusted upstream and community projects and delivers a Kubernetes platform that is engineered and supported by VMware, so that you do not have to build your Kubernetes environment by yourself. In addition to Kubernetes binaries that are tested, signed, and supported by VMware, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid provides the services such as networking, authentication, ingress control, and logging that a production Kubernetes environment requires.

Something to be aware of is that there are different implementations of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. The most common implementations are:

• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service (TKGS)
• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid multi-cloud (TKGm)

At their most basic all of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid implementations provision and manage the lifecycle of Tanzu Kubernetes clusters and provide a platform for running containerized Kubernetes workloads. The way that they do this however is slightly different based on the features and functionality that need to be provided to a consumer. The major thing to be aware of is the supported infrastructure the platform can be deployed on. TKGS is provided as part of vSphere with Tanzu and is only supported on vSphere based infrastructure. TKGm however can be deployed on vSphere, AWS and Azure based infrastructure.

Both have the concept of a Management Cluster which can be used to manage and deploy Kubernetes clusters but in the case of TKGS this is a highly opinionated VMware variant named the Supervisor cluster. The Supervisor cluster is not a conformant Kubernetes cluster by design and makes use of Kubernetes and its inherent functionality to enhance vSphere and add a number of additional features such as:

• vSphere Namespaces (Basic Multi-Tenancy)
• vSphere PODs (Ability to run Kubernetes Pods natively on ESXi hypervisor alongside virtual machines)
• vSphere SSO integration (Cluster authentication via configured vSphere mechanisms)
• vSphere Registry Service (Embedded Harbor instance)

The Supervisor cluster is deployed by enabling Workload Management from within vSphere. Workload Management provides tight integration with the underlying vSphere storage and networking stack such as vSAN and NSX-T.

In comparison TKGm makes use of the upstream Cluster API Kubernetes sub-project and can be used to deploy a conformant Kubernetes cluster to your choice of supported infrastructure. The management cluster is deployed as an initial step after which workload clusters can be deployed. Due to the fact that TKGm is based on upstream Kubernetes it is much more customizable to advanced use cases such as those for Telco for instance.

A more detailed comparison of the TKG implementations can be found in the links below.

Watch the overview video and then follow the links below to get some quick hit information about TKG, but don't worry about becoming an expert at the current point. The goal here is to familiarize yourself with the product in its standalone form, at a high level.

This lab is one module out of a larger "hands-on lab" (HOL). You can access the overall lab by browsing to the URL below, or directly open it in a new tab by using the Launch Lab Module link in the Links section at the bottom of this page. If you haven't created an HOL account before then you'll need to sign up for one, but don't worry as there is no cost.

• https://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/lab/10414

Once at the HOL page, ENROLL in the lab and start it. The modules of the lab can be found by clicking TABLE OF CONTENTS from the lab guide area on the right-hand side of the screen, and as shown below:

From there select Module 2 - Introduction to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and perform the steps of that module. Do not worry about taking the remaining modules as you will cover those in stages later in this course after watching video lessons.

Note that the duration of each HOL session is quite short, but you can re-enroll as many times as you wish in order to complete the labs.

VMware Tanzu Mission Control™ is a centralized management platform for consistently operating and securing your Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across multiple teams and clouds.

Available through VMware Cloud™ services, Tanzu Mission Control provides operators with a single control point to give developers the independence they need to drive business forward, while ensuring consistent management and operations across environments for increased security and governance.

This lab is one module out of a larger "hands-on lab" (HOL). You can access the overall lab by browsing to the URL below, or directly open it in a new tab by using the Launch Lab Module link in the in the Links section at the bottom of this page. If you haven't created an HOL account before then you'll need to sign up for one, but don't worry as there is no cost.

• https://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/lab/10414

Once at the HOL page, ENROLL in the lab and start it. The modules of the lab can be found by clicking TABLE OF CONTENTS from the lab guide area on the right-hand side of the screen, and as shown below:

From there select Module 3 - VMware Tanzu Mission Control and perform the steps of that module. Do not worry about taking the remaining modules as you will cover those in stages later in this course after watching video lessons.

Note that the duration of each HOL session is quite short, but you can re-enroll as many times as you wish in order to complete the labs.

Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is a high-performance streaming analytics platform that supports observability for metrics, counters, histograms, and traces/spans. The product is unique because it scales to very high data ingestion rates and query loads. You can collect data from many services and sources across your entire application stack, and can look at details for earlier data that were ingested earlier.

Watch the overview for an introduction to the product and its usage. For more advanced knowledge you can take the optional Tanzu Observability Fundamentals course.

This lab is one module out of a larger "hands-on lab" (HOL). You can access the overall lab by browsing to the URL below, or directly open it in a new tab by using the Launch Lab Module link in the in the Links section at the bottom of this page. If you haven't created an HOL account before then you'll need to sign up for one, but don't worry as there is no cost.

• https://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/lab/10414

Once at the HOL page, ENROLL in the lab and start it. The modules of the lab can be found by clicking TABLE OF CONTENTS from the lab guide area on the right-hand side of the screen, and as shown below:

From there select Module 4 - Tanzu Observability Basics and perform the steps of that module. Do not worry about taking the remaining modules as you will cover those in stages later in this course after watching video lessons.

Note that the duration of each HOL session is quite short, but you can re-enroll as many times as you wish in order to complete the labs.

NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) provides multi-cloud load balancing, web application firewall, and container ingress services. This video gives a brief overview and demonstration of NSX ALB.

NSX ALB was formerly known as the Avi load balancer, and you will find many references to that name in videos and documentation.

There is an extensive site dedicated to NSX ALB education, and the main product site contains links to many resources and hands-on labs. Both sites are linked to below.

This lab is one module out of a larger "hands-on lab" (HOL). You can access the overall lab by browsing to the URL below, or directly open it in a new tab by using the Launch Lab Module link in the in the Links section at the bottom of this page. If you haven't created an HOL account before then you'll need to sign up for one, but don't worry as there is no cost.

• https://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/lab/10414

Once at the HOL page, ENROLL in the lab and start it. The modules of the lab can be found by clicking TABLE OF CONTENTS from the lab guide area on the right-hand side of the screen, and as shown below:

From there select Module 5 - Introduction to the NSX Advanced Load Balancer and perform the steps of that module. Do not worry about taking the remaining modules as you will cover those in stages later in this course after watching video lessons.

Note that the duration of each HOL session is quite short, but you can re-enroll as many times as you wish in order to complete the labs.

Tanzu Service Mesh provides advanced, end-to-end connectivity, security, and insights for modern applications—across application end-users, microservices, APIs, and data—enabling compliance with Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and data protection and privacy regulations.

Watch the overview and then follow the links below to get some quick hit information about TSM, but don't worry about becoming an expert at the current point. The goal here is to familiarize yourself with the product in its standalone form, at a high level.

This video demonstrates some of the capabilities of Tanzu Service Mesh. In particular, it shows how a global namespace can be used to provide a single, abstracted view of services in a complex microservice application, deployed across different clouds and Kubernetes clusters. It also shows how easy it is to onboard new clusters and to use the service discovery and encryption capabilities.

There is an opportunity for "hands on" experience with TSM in the TKO Test Drive lesson within this course.

Antrea is a Kubernetes-native project that implements the Container Network Interface (CNI) and Kubernetes NetworkPolicy thereby providing network connectivity and security for pod workloads. Antrea extends the benefit of programmable networks from Open vSwitch (OVS) to Kubernetes.

This overview video is an edited excerpt from the Introduction to Project Antrea - VMware Code video linked below.

Follow the links below if you would like to get some more detailed information about Antrea.

Tanzu uses the Carvel suite of tools mostly focusing on ytt for YAML templating and kapp with kapp-controller for package management. This video provides a quick overview of the Carvel suite.

The "TKO Test Drive" provides you will access to a fuller environment, for a longer period, than the hands-on labs. Again, you will have to sign up for a free account to access this system (known as "Pathfinder").

You can start the test drive by using the Launch Test Drive link in the Links section below.

Note that when you launch this test drive you will get some emails from the following that you may not be expecting. This is normal.

• VMware Cloud Services
• Wavefront

This is because the test drive will temporarily create groups, accounts, and grant permissions to areas for the length that the test drive is active.