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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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Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is more than just an App Modernization Engine

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Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is an exciting solution that was launched last year as a Tech Preview, initially on VMware Cloud on AWS and shortly after for any vSphere environment. Application Transformer (App Transformer) is a continuous application modernization engine that enables organizations to easily assess all workloads running in a vSphere-based environment and provide a detailed application analysis including their topology and external dependencies, which can then be containerized by leveraging the App Transformer solution.

Note: If you are interested in deep diving into App Transformer and how it can help with your app modernization initiatives, check out my VMworld 2021 session recording MCL2290 - App Modernization Deep Dive with VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Tanzu to learn more.


Although the primary use case for App Transformer is for application modernization, I quickly realized App Transformer can actually benefit our broader VMware customers.

Regardless if you are starting a Cloud Migration or App Modernization project, I do believe App Transformer can be an invaluable tool that can provide organizations with deep insights into their overall application portfolio to help make better and informed decisions when managing and supporting their VMware infrastructure. In addition to this visibility, the information from App Transformer can also empower our IT Admins, which I also believe can be a key enabler to their organizations App Modernization efforts.

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Quick Tip - Access the RabbitMQ management UI when using the Kubernetes operator

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I was recently working with the RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator, which provides an easy way to deploy and manage RabbitMQ clusters using Kubernetes (k8s). In fact, the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution also makes use of RabbitMQ operator as part of its backend infrastructure.

While troubleshooting my RabbitMQ deployment yesterday, I came to learn about a really useful tip in accessing the RabbitMQ management console UI which provides a number of useful pieces of information including resource utilization. Once logged in, we quickly found the issue which was due to memory pressure and once that was resolved, everything was working as expected.


I was not aware that RabbitMQ had this useful dashboard and that you could easily access it once you knew how to retrieve the credentials.

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