In a world where organizations are often defined by the digital services they can deliver, it’s crucial for underlying IT infrastructure to move as quickly as the business demands. To support our customers with getting the most out of a Kubernetes powered environment, we continue to make enhancements to VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.
In this post we’ll discuss some of the new capabilities our customers will benefit from using in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.5.
Support for Kubernetes 1.22 and Cluster API v1beta1
This release introduces support for Kubernetes 1.22 and Cluster API v1beta1. Cluster API has demonstrated growing adoption, feature maturity, and a strong commitment to community and inclusive innovation.
Topology Awareness supported by vSphere CSI Driver 2.4
The recent vSphere CSI Driver 2.4 introduced support for topology awareness, allowing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid users to optimize the performance of their workloads. Now, cluster-level topology is exposed to the scheduler, and constraints can be kept when placing pods on nodes.
This enhancement provides the ability for you to segment the cluster into racks, regions, or zones for example. This ultimately provides maximum performance, flexibility, and minimal disruption over the lifetime of a workload.
Tanzu Mission Control integration
Many organizations that have seen the benefits of using Kubernetes on-premises are now looking to extend to their public cloud and edge environments. To do so, users need the ability to provision clusters consistently across all of their infrastructure, as well as have a way to consistently manage a growing cluster fleet. This is where VMware Tanzu Mission Control comes into play.
With this new integration, users can provision Tanzu Kubernetes Grid workload clusters directly in the environment of choice as well as manage the lifecycle of the clusters via Tanzu Mission Control. Centralizing a Kubernetes footprint with Tanzu Mission Control entails consistent and efficient management for things such as identity and access, security and compliance, configurations, and global visibility over all clusters.
Support for Tanzu Application Platform
Along with the benefits that cloud native ecosystems provide comes countless complexities and decisions to make. Developers have found themselves with the overwhelming responsibility of delivering code at rapid speed while still meeting security requirements and integrating new apps with the existing back-end services. A large percentage of developers’ workday has been absorbed by tedious infrastructure tasks instead of investing it in innovation and code writing.
That’s why the latest release supports VMware Tanzu Application Platform. App developers and operators can work to eliminate team silos while building and delivering an efficient multi-cloud experience. Operators can give developers access to the resources they need without losing control of the infrastructure by defining the guardrails that fit the security and compliance needs ahead of time. This allows developers to focus on value -adding activities and operators to keep the IT organization running smoothly.
Support for NodePortLocal
Another important feature to highlight as a part of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.5 release is support for NodePortLocal (NPL), which runs as part of the Antrea Agent. This feature improves the integration with external load balancers as they are now able to check the availability of each pod separately.
Windows container support general availability
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.5 includes official support for Windows containers. Windows developers and platform operators can develop Windows applications in containers for portability and then centralize management alongside Linux-based applications in Kubernetes.
Improved install and upgrade functionality
It’s safe to say that if an organization is using Kubernetes, they value speed and efficiency. That’s why VMware has worked to make the installation and upgrade processes as seamless as possible.
In addition to the recent enhancements made to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and a quickly changing industry, one thing remains consistent. That’s VMware’s commitment to follow upstream development and provide proven stability, reliability, and security expertise. You can learn more about how to get the most of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid by visiting the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid product page or checking out the VMware Cloud Native Apps YouTube channel.
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