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Using Terraform to activate Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service on VMware Cloud on AWS

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It has been awhile since I have played with Terraform and I was recently investigating on whether I could use Terraform to automate the activation of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Service on a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC, which is a part of VMware's new managed Kubernetes offering called VMware Cloud with Tanzu services. Although there is an existing VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A) Terraform provider, it currently does not support configuring or managing the TKG Service.

Today, customers can automate VMware Cloud with Tanzu services with a simple REST API and with that in mind, I was curious if calling into a REST API using Terraform was even a thing? While searching online, I not only came to find out that directly calling a REST API using Terraform was a thing but that there were actually a few Terraform providers that enabled this capability. The most popular being Mastercard's Restapi Terraform provider, which was also updated just a couple of weeks ago.

I ended up learning a ton more about Terraform through this exercise and the final solution has been contributed to Ryan Johnson's amazing VMware Terraform Examples repo. I also have to give a huge shoutout to Ryan, who I consider one of the experts in the community for all things VMware and Terraform! I was also able to bounce some ideas and also learn a few new tricks in one of our recent conversations. 

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vSphere Event-Driven Automation using Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) on Tanzu Community Edition

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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 in Tanzu Community Edition (TCE), which is a completely free Enterprise-grade Kubernetes available to anyone in the community to use. 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. If you are interested in deploying this using the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Service, check out this other recent blog post that outlines the specific steps.

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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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