WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: vSphere with Kubernetes

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

by // 1 Comment

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. 

[Read more...]

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

by // 2 Comments

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.

[Read more...]

Hybrid (x86 and Arm) Kubernetes clusters using Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm

by // Leave a Comment

With the recent introduction of Tanzu Community Edition (TCE), users can now easily get first hand experience across VMware's Tanzu portfolio, including VMware's Enterprise Kubernetes (K8s) runtime called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), all completely for free. One popular request that frequently comes up from our community is the ability to use TCE with the ESXi-Arm Fling.

Currently, TCE is only supported with x86 hardware platforms which includes ESXi-x86 and there is certainly a desire to be able to use TCE with Arm-based hardware running on top of ESXi-Arm, especially with inexpensive Raspberry Pi for learning and exploration purposes.

I recently came to learn about a really cool project that is being developed as part of VMware's Office of the CTO (OCTO) for a new Cluster API (CAPI) provider where you can Bring Your own Host (BYOH) that is already running Linux. What really intrigued me about their project was not the fact that they could create a TCE Workload Cluster that comprised of physical hosts but the fact that they were actually running on Arm hardware! ?

My immediate reaction was to see if this would also work with just Linux VMs? With some trial/error and help from Jixing Jia, one of the project maintainers, I was able to confirm that this indeed does works using Ubuntu VMs running on ESXi-Arm. What was even more impressive was the realization that this not only works for both physical and virtual Arm Linux systems, but that users could also create a hybrid TCE Workload Cluster that consists of BOTH x86 and Arm nodes! ?

I can only imagine the possibilities that this could enable in the future where application(s) could potentially span across CPU architecture, virtual and physical worker nodes which exposes different capabilities that can then be delivered based on the requirements of the application such as GPU as an example. It will be interesting to see the types of use cases the BYOH Cluster API Provider will help enable, especially pertaining to Edge computing.

If you are interested in playing with the BYOH Cluster API Provider, check out the detailed instructions below on how to get started. Since this is still currently in Alpha development, there are still a few manual steps and currently there is no native TCE integration. If this is something that is interesting to you, feel free to leave any feedback or better yet, leave comments directly on the Github repo asking for feature enhancements that you would like to see such as native support for TCE 😀

[Read more...]