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Custom webhook function to publish events into VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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In my previous article, I demonstrated how you can leverage the upcoming v0.7 release of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) to publish and consume custom events to easily extend your event-driven automation to other event sources. As a recap, this is accomplished by constructing and sending a conformant CloudEvent to VEBA, which can then be consumed by your functions.


This is perfect for external event sources that can create a custom HTTP payload that conforms to the CloudEvent specification, however not all solutions have this type of functionality or flexibility. An alternative solution to this is to simply create a VEBA function that can accept a custom payload and then handle the transformation of the data into a valid CloudEvent and then forward that off to broker running within VEBA. This is just one of the many benefits of Knative, the backend for VEBA, where each function deployment includes an endpoint that is automatically served as a subdomain to the VEBA hostname (e.g. https://my-function.NAMESPACE.VEBA-FQDN)


This solution would enable external "Event Producer" to send a non-CloudEvent payload which can then be processed by your function and re-publish as a conformant CloudEvent that can then be consumed by other function and services.

  1. Event Provider would make HTTP request to the function webhook with a custom payload
  2. A conformant CloudEvent payload is constructed by the webhook function
  3. Webhook function will then forward the CloudEvent internally to the VMware Event Broker Appliance
  4. VEBA functions can now react to these custom CloudEvents

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IT Admins can be a key enabler to an organizations App Modernization efforts

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Whether you call it Digital Transformation, Digital First, Application Modernization (App Modernization) or some other fancy name, the fact of the matter is, almost every single business is going through some form of transformation to become more competitive in this new digital era. According to a recent survey by VMware, 91% of executives agree their major app initiative in 2021 is to migrate and modernize legacy apps. While this transformation has been going on for some time, the COVID-19 global pandemic has certainly super charged its acceleration and is now a critical imperative for many organizations to be able to create and deliver new digital experiences for their end users.

As part of my role within the VMware Cloud team, I have been taking a closer look at how some of our customers are thinking about their App Modernization strategy and to better understand their overall plan and thought process. With some of the recent customer conversations that I have had, many organizations are just starting their App Modernization journey and one of the challenges that I have observed is simply where and how to get started. There are certainly many different factors that can affect or even slow down these initiatives including organizational structure, tension between lines of businesses, development, operations and IT teams. However, before an organization can decide what application/services they are interested in modernizing, they need to first have a complete understanding of their current application estate.

This understanding is critical before an organization can determine the appropriate modernization strategy (Retain, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor or Retire) for a given application.


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How to clean up stale vSphere Container Volumes & First Class Disks?

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If you are running and deploying Kubernetes (K8s) which includes vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), you might notice vSphere Container Volumes showing up in the vSphere UI under the Monitor tab for a given vSphere-based Datastore. This is normal and expected as new Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) are being requested as part of deploying K8s-based application that require storage.


Typically, when PVs and PVCs are no longer needed, they should be cleaned up within the K8s layer via kubectl either automatically or manually depending on your provisioning process. When you delete a K8s Cluster, these PVs/PVCs are not automatically cleaned up and its for good reason, you may want to reuse them and the way vSphere supports this is by implementing them as First Class Disks (FCD), which means they are lifecycle independent of a VM.

What happens when the K8s Cluster has been deleted and you actually want to clean up these stale FCDs, how do you go about doing that? This is a question I have seen come up more frequently and there are a few options.

Option 1:

If you happen to be on vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (which was just released yesterday), the vSphere UI has been enhanced to allow users to now delete vSphere Container Volume (see screenshot above). Previously, you could only view the FCDs and reapply a storage policy.

Option 2:

Since vSphere Container Volumes are just FCDs and we have FCD APIs, we can use the API to retrieve information as well as clean them up. The easiest way is to use PowerCLI's Get-CnsVolume and Remove-CnsVolume cmdlets.

Here is an example of deleting the 2GB volume:

Get-CnsVolume -Datastore (Get-Datastore "sm-vsanDatastore") -Name "pvc-db6829ad-e1a9-46e8-ace3-7e7c18187a0d" | Remove-CnsVolume

In the case of standalone FCDs, which could have been manually provisioned or through a backup solution, you can also clean them up by using PowerCLI's Get-VDisk and Remove-VDisk cmdlets respectively:

Get-VDisk -Name "fill-me-in" | Remove-VDisk