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Search Results for: Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

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

04.27.2022 by William Lam // 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.ย 

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Categories // VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Tanzu Tags // Tanzu services, Terraform, VMware Cloud on AWS

vSphere Event-Driven Automation using Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service

01.26.2022 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

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.

๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ™Œ๐Ÿฅณ

โœ… Tanzu services on #VMWonAWS
โœ… Tanzu Application Platform
โœ… Cloud Native Runtime
โœ… Sources for vSphere
โœ… VMC vCenter Events via Sockeye
โœ… Powershell function to notify via Slack when VM Powered Off (existing #VEBA function) pic.twitter.com/7v8npFY73S

— William Lam (@lamw) December 9, 2021

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Categories // Cloud Native, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Tanzu, vSphere Tags // Cloud Native Runtime, Tanzu Application Platform, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Tanzu services, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Event Broker Appliance, vSphere with Tanzu

Exploration of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) multi-vCenter Server templating using YTT

07.16.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

The motivation behind this blog post originates from a really cool blog post by Mike Brown who shared an interesting Telco use case for wanting to running Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) and centrally managing TKG Workload Clusters, which would run at each individual Edge/Cell Site location.

Awesome post from @vcdx71, lots of great nuggets! https://t.co/1tPFv1kpHf

1) ๐Ÿ”ฅ@VMwareTanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) w/multi-vCenter Servers

2) ๐Ÿ“ˆ Continue adoption of #VMWonAWS for DC Evac & extending to Edge Mgmt

3)๐Ÿ“ก Cell Site/RAN mention,โ™ฅ๏ธ innovations from Telco customers

— William Lam (@lamw) July 13, 2021

While reading through Mike's blog post, I noticed one of the steps was to edit the generated YAML from the TKG Management Cluster which would then be used to deploy the individual TKG Workload Clusters. This would need to happen for each new deployment ๐Ÿ˜ฎ and of course, this could be very error prone and frustrating for end users. Here is an example of what the YAML file looks like which is over 1K+ lines!

This screams for automation and I had been looking for a reason to try out YTT again, which is a YAML templating tool that is part of the open source project Carvel. Although I had played with YTT before, it did not feel intuitive, especially for a new user who was trying to solve a quick problem. I figured this was my opportunity to take another look at YTT.

After a couple of hours and a lot of trial/error, I ended up with a partial solution and realized that I would not be able to figure this out given there were even more complicated sections within the YAML. I felt the bar to getting started with YTT was still too high and it may not be the right tool for this particular situation. I opted for a quicker solution using sed, which I had experience with before, but I also know that depending on the problem, sed can be just as complex and I also dislike regular expressionsย  ๐Ÿ™‚

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu Tags // Carvel, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, yaml, ytt

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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