Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

I have been working with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) quite a bit lately and using their new slick TKG CLI for deploying standalone Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (TKC) which can run in both VMware Cloud on AWS as well as your on-premises vSphere 6.7 Update 3 environment. If you have vSphere 7 and the vSphere with Kubernetes capability, it also supports TKG deployments natively as part of that solution but you can also use TKG CLI to deploy TKC's.

Out of the box, TKG includes all the necessary software components to deploy a production grade, upstream and conformant Kubernetes distribution. For most customers, the "batteries included" type of offering is more than sufficient but for some customers who may wish to customize some of these components further when running the standalone distribution. One such example is swapping out the default Container Network Interface (CNI) which uses Calico for a different CNI with more capabilities.

As you may have guess from the title of this post, we will be replacing Calico with Antrea which is another open source CNI. In fact, Antrea was started by VMware last year and uses Open vSwitch (OVS) to provide network and security capabilities to Kubernetes. You can read more about Project Antrea here and more details about its architecture can be found here.

Disclaimer: This is currently not officially supported by VMware. I do know the TKG team is looking at Antrea support in the future.

Last week, VMware had its huge launch which included VMware Cloud Foundation 4, vSphere 7, vSAN 7 and the brand new VMware Tanzu Portfolio that will help organizations build, run and manage modern applications for their business. Although we still have a couple of more months before general availability, the level of excitement for these upcoming releases was pretty amazing to see on social media, especially for the highly anticipated Kubernetes with vSphere capability, formally known as Project Pacific.

UPDATE (04/10/20) - TKG 1.0 has officially GA'ed, you can now deploy TKG Clusters using the new TKG CLI/UI as demonstrated in this blog post.

When vSphere 7 is available, Kubernetes with vSphere is just one way in which customers will be able to deploy upstream and conformant Open Source Kubernetes also referred to as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). For customers that require a solution today or for those that may not able to upgrade to vSphere 7 immediately, VMware has another option called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus for vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS which was also announced last week but albeit not many folks took notice.

There are few things worth mentioning about Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus:

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus is a new offering that is comprised of the core TKG software and it includes support from VMware's Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE), which is a team made up of Kubernetes Architects that can help customers design and architect their Cloud Native Applications running on the VMware Tanzu Platform
For customers that do not require CRE support and just want standard VMware GSS Support, then you can simply use Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) which includes VMware Support and Subscription (SnS)
The core TKG software which Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus includes can deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster (upstream K8s running in VMs). Customers can already do this right now by using Cluster API (CAPI) and specifically the Cluster API Provider for vSphere (CAPV) which provides lifecycle management of Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster running on any valid vSphere endpoint including VMware Cloud on AWS. The latest CAPV v1alpha3 release also introduces a new workflow that reduces the number of steps compared to v1alpha2 which is now deprecated

For customers that want to further customize how Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster are deployed and configured including tools that they are already using, CAPV will be the most flexible option. Having gone through the CAPV workflows myself, I think it can still be daunting if you are new to this space, not to mention the different CLI tools that you will have to learn to have a successful deployment. Luckily, the VMware TKG team has also been thinking about the overall user experience and how they can build on top of CAPV to provide a much more simpler and more intuitive interface for customers that is just looking for a turnkey option.

Here is a sneak peek (Technical Preview) of the upcoming Tanzu Kubernetes Grid CLI or TKG CLI for short which will make deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster on ANY vSphere endpoint incredibly EASY!

How to deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster with Antrea CNI

Sneak peek at deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere & VMware Cloud on AWS