Tanzu Mission Control, VMware’s centralized Kubernetes management platform, is evolving quickly from its initial release in 2020 to adapt to industry trends and changing customer needs. As observed in the VMware State of Kubernetes 2023 report, over 50% of respondents indicated they wanted to leverage multiple clouds to reduce vendor dependency, while 42% wanted to expand disaster recovery and cloud backup options. In addition, 57% of respondents indicated that organizational challenges encountered managing Kubernetes were due to inadequate internal experience and expertise, while 52% indicated it was due to meeting security and compliance requirements. One of the focus areas that we continue to see rapid growth and need for is sovereign-compliant developer-ready services for our partners that work with business industries that are highly regulated, or subject to regional jurisdictional requirements. As discussed in our partner blog post from VMware Explore 2022, companies worldwide are moving from legacy application infrastructure to a modern app development and deployment platform using containers and Kubernetes. More and more enterprises are asking their traditional IaaS partners to help them in this journey and expect them to offer PaaS services such as container services, database services, and developer-ready data services for their workloads.
VMware has invested heavily in services for our Cloud Services Providers to meet this need, delivering developer-ready solutions that address the needs of modern application workloads for their customers in these highly regulated industries or jurisdictions. With customers increasingly looking to our partners to help them deploy container-based applications or modernize existing applications on these sovereign-compliant clouds, the need for centralized management tools within those same regulated environments to manage and secure them has also risen sharply. To address this requirement, we are pleased to announce the initial general availability of VMware Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed for our Cloud Services Provider and Sovereign Cloud Provider partners.
What is Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed?
Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed is a sovereign-compliant version of our Tanzu Mission Control SaaS offering – a centralized platform for simplified Kubernetes cluster management – but purpose-built and designed for use in regulated industries that are extremely sensitive to data privacy and data sovereignty regulations across different jurisdictions, such as financial services, healthcare, and the public sector.
It has been specifically architected for local deployments on partner clouds and integrates with VMware Cloud Director and Container Service Extension for multi-tenant management. The solution does not require internet connectivity and is not delivered as a SaaS solution. Sovereign Cloud and Cloud Services Providers who are currently offering Kubernetes Infrastructure as a Service within their datacenters (on-premises) to run container workloads in a multi-tenant environment using VMware Cloud Director and Container Service Extension can locally deploy Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed within their partner cloud to centrally manage their tenant’s Kubernetes clusters and apply policies securely and seamlessly from the same environment – even within air-gapped environments if required by the tenant.
Why is Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed important for Cloud Services Providers?
Like hyperscalers, our Sovereign Cloud Providers and Cloud Services Provider – Cloud Builders can offer a portfolio of modern application solutions to deliver secure, highly-available, compliant, and scalable Container-as-a-Service offerings to run tenant Kubernetes cluster workloads, as well as offer additional messaging, data caching, and database services for partners who need an expanded set of Kubernetes capabilities for their application workloads. The addition of Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed addresses the centralized multi-tenant container management requirements partners need for our regulated customer workloads at scale, ensuring that partners can continue to align solutions to market trends and their customer workload needs.
How does Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed benefit Cloud Services Providers?
Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed, with its intuitive workflows to attach, detach, and view Kubernetes clusters, integrates with VMWare Cloud Director and Container Services Extension and can easily be consumed to increase incremental services revenue for container workloads across multiple tenants. Partners can build economies of scale with their full-featured multi-tenant container services infrastructure, while their end tenants can focus on accelerating their application modernization goals by leveraging a partner’s container-ready infrastructure and technical expertise. Because VMware partners deliver these solutions along with their localized expertise to customers that operate in regulated environments or under jurisdictional requirements that hypercsalers cannot address, they can capture this important segment of the market that requires these self-managed or fully-managed services and build a competitive advantage in their region for these services.
Where to get more information
For more information about the Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed offering, read our Tanzu Mission Control documentation, visit the Sovereign Cloud Solutions webpage, or talk to your VMware representative. Additional resources: