02. VMware Tanzu

VMware Tanzu

Why CAPI is awesome

A quick overview of Tanzu

Kubernetes is the core

Digital Transformations

Kubernetes

Observability, Metrics, Logging

Container Registry

Networking, Load Balancing and Ingress

Policies and Conformance

Authentication and Certificates

Cluster Lifecycle

And more…

As far as competitive landscape goes, this is how I would explain where Tanzu fits in at present.

On the one side if you want maximum flexibility, you would get raw kubernetes from upstream and then carefully evaluate and select all the associated tools and services required to complete your own PaaS.

On the other side, you select a full OOB PaaS like OpenShift where you have all the tools well integrated but your more locked-in with selection when it comes to receiving support, and the fact you are paying a premium for the tight integration.

There are all kind of vendors that vary on this scale and I would describe Tanzu as a bit of a hybrid of both extremes.

90% of the functionality of OpenShift
Yet, still flexibility on a component level.

Given the right support tier (that’s the catch) they actually give you multiple supported and verified component options to choose from.

And if those don’t suit, then you can step into supported 3rd party components.

There is no hard lock-in through dependencies due to the way it’s built which we will get into shortly.

A couple of real-world examples of different selections;

Environment A
- Small SaaS provider
- Started with OpenShift v3
- Out grew it’s capabilities
- Frustrated with Red Hat specific ways and moved to a RancherOS based platform.
Environment B
- Slow moving Top 4 bank
- Got into Kubernetes early
- Already deep into Red Hat due to OpenStack use so OpenShift was the absolute perfect fit
Environment C
- Internally at Red Hat
- Managing hundreds of ephemeral clusters using OpenShift
- Due to the way it’s built, it’s not really meant for that and we had to develop a lot of custom tooling which was a massive time sink.
- But drinking your own champagne was the motto there they accepted that additional effort as the cost of doing business.

The point is it’s all about finding a balance and the best tool for the job and hopefully a platform that’s flexible enough to cater for changing requirements in the future.