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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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How to create a kubernetes service account for vSphere with Tanzu?

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Before you can interact and consume resources from a vSphere with Tanzu enabled cluster, users must first login and one way to accomplish this is by using the kubectl-vsphere plugin.

Once authenticated, a JWT (JSON Web Token), pronounced jot token, will be issued along with other values which will be appended to your local ~/.kube/config file. Users will then be able to perform kubectl operations based on the roles they have been assigned for a given vSphere Namespace. In case you did not know, these JWT tokens are only valid for 10 hours and after that, you will need to login again to retrieve a new JWT token.

We can also confirm this by decoding our JWT token found within the ~/.kube/config file and using jwt.io website. Once decoded, we can see when the token was issued using iat (Issued At) and when the token will expired using exp (Expiration Time) as shown in the screenshot below.

The default 10 hour expiry is currently not configurable which can be a challenge for anyone looking to setup unattended automation or GitOps with vSphere with Tanzu.

An alternative solution is to create a Kubernetes (k8s) service account, which by default does not contain a token expiry. Using this information and my recent Deep Dive into vSphere Namespace Roles, I was able to create a service account that can perform the same set of vSphere with Tanzu operations without having to re-login every 10 hours.

Note (06/07/22) - The "Edit" vSphere Namespace Role now includes the ability to create K8s service account and rolebinding without having to go into Supervisor Cluster Control Plane VM

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Can I deploy both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and vSphere with Tanzu on same vSphere Cluster?

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A simple question with a simple answer, yes! I have seen this question get asked in various internal Slack channels on whether you can deploy both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and vSphere with Tanzu (formally Project Pacific) on the same vSphere Cluster? If you were an early user of TKG, you may recall that if you attempted to deploy TKG to a vSphere Cluster which already had vSphere with Tanzu enabled, it would prevent you from proceeding. Instead of having to deploy another Kubernetes management control plane, you could simply leverage and connect to the Supervisor Cluster control plane using the TKG CLI and start deploying TKG Workload Clusters.

From a technical standpoint, there is no reason that TKG and vSphere with Tanzu could not co-exist on the same vSphere Cluster. In fact, this request has come up a number of times that the original TKG behavior has been recently updated to now allow for this co-existence. From an exploratory and learning point of view, this is quite useful to be able to try out both solution and not have to dedicate a specific vSphere Cluster for each of the Tanzu Kubernetes (K8s) offerings. A more practical use case that came up recently from a customer was being able to use both solution as a way to consolidate their workloads using a specific Tanzu K8s solution, which makes total sense. Today, there are still some differences in terms of the features and capabilities between TKG and vSphere with Tanzu and depending on your needs, you may have a use case for both in your environment.

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