Deepa Kalani and Ramiro Salas from the VMware team spoke at SpringOne 2020 Conference last week about the Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM) product and how it helps developers with Global Namespaces to implement access control and security policies, as well as visualization tools to show application-centric metrics.

A service mesh decouples services from having to know about the network and helps developers to focus on business logic. A typical service mesh can provide:

• Service discovery
• Weighted routing (for A/B deployments)
• Mutual TLS based authentication (including certificate rotation)
• Advanced telemetry for in-depth observability
• Fault injection and retries
• Circuit breakers

Today developers are working on cloud native applications and need to deal with monolithic apps, microservices, and serverless functions (FaaS) based models. A Service Mesh must be able to support all of the corporate developer use cases. It also needs to be transparent and it needs to be out of the way, so developers can be productive by focusing on application functionality and business logic.

Salas and Kalani also talked about VMware’s service mesh vision which incudes eliminating fragmentation by consistently connecting, controlling and monitoring software hosted on traditional VM’s as well as Kubernetes and public clouds. Tanzu Service Mesh consits of an SaaS based control plane that supports multi-cluster and multi-platform infrastructure.

Salas discussed Global Namespaces support in the service mesh, which helps with isolating and decoupling the applications from infrastructure. TSM also leverages sidecar technologies like Envoy that don’t need to add a lot of overhead and can reach out to the edge of the VM’s.

He also talked about some of the new projects they are working on, like Project Hamlet, an open-source initiative to define service discovery API for federated service meshes. The project supports federation with third party service meshes like Google Anthos or Hashicorp ConsulConnect.

Tanzu Service Mesh’s Policy Framework provides a continuous security model for cloud-native applications. Policy enforcement can be based on end-users, services/api, or the data. The framework includes an Identity Engine, Resource Grouping Model and a risk-based policy actions module.

Kalani demonstrated the different features of Tanzu Service Mesh and showed how to view the service graph to monitor the calls to each service. For more information about SpringOne Conference, checkout the conference main website and the schedule. The conference material (videos and slides) will be made available to the community starting this week.

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Today’s CIOs and enterprise IT departments continue to look for ways to rapidly expand their critical infrastructure to the cloud. The next evolution of Azure VMware Solution, built by Microsoft and endorsed by VMware, makes it easier than ever for them to move to the cloud with the VMware technologies they know and trust.

We recently caught up with Eric Lockard, corporate vice president, Azure Dedicated at Microsoft, to learn why he’s more than bullish on Azure VMware Solution, how he sees the Microsoft/VMware partnership benefiting customers, and what he sees driving customers’ cloud demand for Azure. We also couldn’t help asking him what he thinks of an IT landscape that’s dramatically different from what it was just a few years ago.

“Cloud is a paradigm shift in more ways than one,” says Lockard. “Microsoft and VMware have emerged to become close partners determined to deliver a win-win for both companies and our shared customers. The very name of this solution – Azure VMware Solution – reflects just how collaborative this effort is across engineering, sales, and marketing functions in both companies.”

Azure VMware Solution enables IT teams to easily integrate their VMware technologies with Microsoft Azure and, in the process, take advantage of the many cloud services offered through it. And because it’s a solution engineered by Microsoft and endorsed by VMware, everything is integrated with the Azure Portal, ensuring that customers are able to maintain their native VMware experience with the tools they know in Azure.

Lockard notes that, as a result, it’s now far easier for customers who want to rapidly migrate to Azure or expand their use of VMware-powered applications to draw on Azure’s capabilities.

“We are laser-focused on making Azure the best cloud for VMware, and we engineered Azure VMware Solution with the expectation that customers can utilize it as just another flavor of Azure Compute, able to easily take advantage of the full breadth of Azure services,” Lockard adds. “It’s equally applicable to customers that want to be all native on one cloud while using their VMware compute platform, those that want everything on an abstraction layer to avoid any perceived constraints, and enterprises that know they will always be multi-cloud. In this way we’re also creating the multi-cloud choice that VMware makes possible.”

Moving to the Cloud as the Transformation to Software Continues
We also asked Lockard what is prompting customers to enhance their existing infrastructure with the cloud or, alternatively, motivating them to migrate to it completely.

“This is an evolution that’s been going on for years, and there are all sorts of reasons for people to embrace it,” he says. “Some want to pay by the day or the month. Others don’t want to manage hardware. Others want to take advantage of the ‘burstiness’ of the cloud and the ability it gives them to take on new projects, or want a backup or disaster failover to the cloud but not the investment in infrastructure that would otherwise be necessary.”

Regardless of the use cases and workloads prompting enterprises to look to the cloud, Lockard believes a more fundamental trend is ultimately fueling Azure’s growth.

“Every company is increasingly a software company,” he says. “Pharmaceuticals – that’s a software business. It is all about taking massive amounts of sample data and analyzing it with AI to quickly model and identify the right drug compounds for safe and effective patient treatments. That application of massive computing is happening in every industry, whether its optimization of manufacturing or e-commerce. A lot of this work is being done with VMware technology, and it’s this idea of taking an existing application estate and complementing it with native-cloud capabilities like machine learning and IoT that will continue to drive significant growth in the cloud.”

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VMware offers Kubernetes on vSphere, but the vendor still has work to do to make vSphere ideal for modern applications. Kubernetes enables applications to run in containers at scale for microservices-based applications, but users must combine a collection of microservices to create a full application — which is one role of a service mesh. VMware now offers Tanzu Service Mesh for vSphere users running Kubernetes containers.

Security is another common service mesh function. A service mesh can manage the isolation of microservices that should not communicate, restrict communication of those that should and validate that each microservice is not malicious. Service meshes also enable you to monitor both your application as a whole and individual transactions as they pass through the application.

For public cloud providers, service meshes look familiar, but many organizations that begin to develop microservices-based applications on their own might have to develop systems to help them build those applications.

The open source service mesh

One way to build a service mesh is to combine the open source tools Istio and Envoy to manage the interactions between microservices.

Microservices run as containers on a Kubernetes cluster. The service mesh then assembles those microservices into an application. Envoy manages network traffic that moves in and out of containers and verifies trust between containers. It operates as a “sidecar” container to each microservice container, and all network traffic in and out of that microservice container must first go through the Envoy container.

Envoy acts like a firewall for the container, and allows only known network traffic in. Istio, meanwhile, acts as more of a control plane. It sets policy for Envoy and provides application-level services.

Together, Istio and Envoy work well as a service mesh; however, both tools have complex setup and operation requirements. This complexity provides an opportunity for software vendors such as VMware to offer a more enterprise-ready offering, as most organizations prefer to buy prepackaged software rather than assemble a service mesh from parts.

VMware’s latest offering: Tanzu Service Mesh

VMware’s Tanzu portfolio aims to centralize management for hybrid and multi-cloud applications, and Tanzu Service Mesh — announced when VMware released vSphere 7 — provides one more factor to this equation. The vendor built Tanzu Service Mesh with the help of Istio and Envoy, so the offering closely resembles a standard, open source service mesh.

A significant difference between Tanzu Service Mesh and an open source service mesh is that Tanzu operates consistently across multiple Kubernetes clusters, rather than being limited to a single cluster. With a single service mesh that spans multiple Kubernetes clusters, an organization can deploy applications that span from on-premises to one or more public cloud providers.

VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is said to be easy to deploy and operate, so businesses can build hundreds of microservice-based applications and deploy them on whatever cloud or on-premises platform best suits each application.

How NSX factors in to Tanzu

VMware also released an NSX Service Mesh, which handles network isolation, security and trust. It appears that Envoy handles these tasks for VMware Tanzu Service Mesh — likely because Tanzu Service Mesh came as a result of VMware’s acquisition of Heptio, an open source Kubernetes management service provider.

NSX is not open source. Therefore, it was unavailable to the Heptio team before the acquisition. VMware has recently implemented new changes to NSX, but NSX Service Mesh does not yet have Envoy’s full feature set. Moving forward, VMware might implement NSX as a replacement for Envoy in its Tanzu Service Mesh.

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More than a decade ago, VMware moved its virtualization software for cloud computing into a separate product family. Now, the Silicon Valley company is taking another major step: deploying container tech and tools to ease cloud migrations.

The NYSE-listed subsidiary of Dell EMC is touting the seventh iteration of its vSphere platform as a total revamp. Significantly, the Silicon Valley company has added management of Kubernetes to the hypervisor’s control plane.

Those open-source containers house applications that can be plugged in on-premises and bolted onto third-party platforms. Enterprises favor such hybrid cloud structures because they shift more of their subsidiary processes to third-party vendors.

The move to what VMware executives call “applications-focused management” lets their customers modernize applications with a simple upgrade. It also keeps VMware relevant as its customers transform digitally.

Tanzu to the Rescue

Initially spun from its core offering for on-premises infrastructure virtualization, the vSphere 7.0 system incorporates a platform called Tanzu to support computer storage and network abstractions for the hybrid cloud.

Tanzu, which was introduced at the VMware’s annual convention last August, lets customers access any application from any device over any cloud, the company says.

The unified operating model joins vSphere with the public cloud, allowing the specialist provider’s customers to manage data storage processes better in their IT environments.

To do it, Tanzu uses Kubernetes, which were originally developed by Google and released for community development in 2015. Since then, companies have used the Kubernetes to deploy, maintain and scale proprietary and third-party applications on different platforms.

A New Foundation

The vSphere platform is part of the company’s Cloud Foundation 4, an integrated suite of software and services for customers’ entire IT stacks. They can use it to create what VMware calls “ hyper-converged infrastructures” which let IT teams manage networked resources from data centers for the cloud and through to its edge, where most applications are deployed.

By re-engineering vSphere to support Kubernetes, VMware says it has created a turnkey application management offering for customers building hybrid structures as they migrate processes to the cloud.

Cloud Foundation 4 embraces platforms sold by cloud market-leader Amazon Web Services and the No. 2 provider Microsoft Azure, as well as Google, IBM, Oracle and others. VMware says containers are the most efficient way to move apps that aren’t cloud-native to those platforms.

Advancing by Acquisition

In creating the new vSphere platform, VMware knitted together technologies it acquired in a flurry of corporate acquisitions. Alongside Grid and Mission Control management systems are catalogues of applications from its Bitnami purchase last May and support services gained in December’s takeover of Pivotal.

Meanwhile, acceleration software from Bitfusion, which VMware acquired in July, lets administrators remotely manage their hybrid architectures at the level of silicon. It includes applications-specific integrated circuits contained in systems on chips as well as field-programmable gate arrays that can be tuned for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.

Security is provided by Carbon Black, acquired in October. It includes encryption of virtual machines and runs to the pods of containerized applications that share resources on host processors in data center servers.

Commercial Imperative

The same changes in service provision that prompted VMware to alter its pricing schedule are driving the vSphere revamp. Moving to the hybrid cloud lets companies retain control of critical processes while shunting noncore functions – and the expense of maintaining and upgrading that infrastructure – to third-party providers.

Outsourcing also relieves administrators from having to allocate digital storage in cloud-based systems, which arises from VMware’s focus on modernization and management at the applications level.

VMware’s executives acknowledge they face challenges from cloud partner-providers, many of whom use the company’s software to virtualize the data center real estate they rent to major corporate customers.

With open-source development producing an expected 500 million new applications in just three years’ time, the execs contend that their customers’ familiarity with tools that facilitate self-service access to remote resources will cut the time to implementation.

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