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vSphere Event-Driven Automation using Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service

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Right before the holiday, I had spent some time exploring Tanzu Application Platform (TAP), which also recently GA'ed. TAP provides developers with an application-aware platform that focuses on making the developer experience easy for developing, building and running applications on Kubernetes.


If you are interested in a quick technical deep dive into TAP, check out this video by Scott Sisil, introducing TAP:

One of the core components of TAP is the Cloud Native Runtime (CNR), which is VMware's commercial offering of the popular open source project Knative. The VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project also makes use of Knative as our backend to provide customers with an event-driven automation solution.

Early on in the VEBA project, we knew that we wanted to develop and innovate with the community in the open but we also understood there would be users who would want an officially supported offering that they can call or file support requests when needed. Early last year, Michael Gasch, the lead architect for VEBA started to port the code from the VMware Event Router, which is the heart of VEBA into CNR's Tanzu Sources for vSphere and start unifying the two code bases. The goal is to ensure that users of the open source project VEBA will also have a consistent user experience in terms of function deployment when using the commercial offering.

As shared back in Dec, I was able to successfully deploy TAP, CNR and Sources for vSphere all running on our Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service which includes both our on-premises offering called vSphere with Tanzu and our managed service offering called VMware Cloud with Tanzu services. For those interested, you can find the instructions below on how to deploy and configure TAP to enable vSphere event-driven automation capabilities for your infrastructure.

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VMware Cloud Enterprise Federation with AWS SSO

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Earlier this week I came to learn about a really cool enhancement that was just added to our VMware Cloud Services Console called Connector-less Self-Service Enterprise Federation Setup, it's a bit of a mouth full, but it basically makes configuring identity federation between the VMware Cloud Services Console and other third party identity provider extremely easy.

Identity federation is not a new feature in VMware Cloud and it has been supported for some time now, but it required customers to deploy the Workspace ONE Access connector into their on-premises environment for federating with either their local or third party identity provider. The new method that was introduced is "connector-less" because it does not require any additional infrastructure to be deployed and it also leverages SAML JIT (Just-in-Time) dynamic provisioning.


While looking at the some the pre-defined identity providers, I noticed that AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) was not listed and since we have customers that use both VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services, this would certainly be a nice way to provide a common logon experience. Another benefit is also for customers using the new VMware Cloud with Tanzu services with Tanzu Mission Control (TMC), they can now easily manage secure access and provide their their end users the ability to provision and consume Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (TKC) without the need of exposing them to the underlying infrastructure which is managed by the Cloud Administrators.

This was certainly a few good reasons to try out this new feature, especially as I have never worked with AWS SSO before.

Here is a quick video for those interested in the final logon experience when VMware Cloud is using AWS SSO as the identity provider:

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Quick demo videos of new VMware Cloud with Tanzu services

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VMware Cloud with Tanzu services is VMware's new managed Kubernetes offering that incorporates the vSphere with Tanzu technology delivered as a managed service as part of our VMware Cloud service offering. The initial release of Tanzu services is currently available on VMware Cloud on AWS, which will require SDDC version 1.16 and a request for enablement (contact your VMware account team) prior to deploying a new SDDC and enabling Tanzu services.

Note: In future, Tanzu services will also be enabled for existing SDDC (brownfield) as well as for other VMware Cloud Infrastructure Services, stay tuned!

Using Tanzu services with VMware Cloud is literally night and day when compared to installing and configuring vSphere with Tanzu yourself, which includes a number of other components to setup! As you would expect, as a service, it is simply a click of a button or API call and users only have to provide four basic input (technically three if you leave one of the recommended defaults) 🙂


Rather than talk about how the new Tanzu service works and some of the things you can do with the service right now, I figured I would record a few quick demo videos. You can find the Youtube playlist below if you wish to watch them all and I have also included a link to a Github repo for the demo examples that were used. Hope you enjoy!

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