News from (pre-)VMworld 2021: Tanzu Community Edition is here!

At DevOpsLoop at VMworld “Tanzu Community Edition” (TCE) was announced. Tanzu Community Edition is a full-featured, easy to manage Kubernetes platform for learners and users. It’s available for free (!) and community supported. You can run TCE on your local workstation or your cloud of preference.

TCE consists of the same open source software used in Tanzu commercial editions. Of course TCE is based on Kubernetes and Cluster API. You can add extra capabilities by adding packages to your environment. Available packages are:

• Cert Manager (K8S certificate manager)
• Contour (ingress)
• External DNS (makes K8S resources discoverable via public DNS)
• Fluentbit (log processor)
• Gatekeeper (custom admission control)
• Grafana (visualization of metrics)
• Knative Serving (manage stateless services)
• Multus CNI (container network interface)
• Prometheus (service & systems monitoring)
• Velero (backup & restore)

An overview of these packages is provided here.

Tanzu Community Edition is a new Tanzu edition next to the existing Basic, Standard and Advanced editions. The big difference is the level of support: while Basic, Standard and Advanced are supported by VMware Global Support Services (GSS), Tanzu Community Edition is supported by…the community. Community support means there are two GitHub repositories available: the community-edition repository contains tooling, installers and packages, while tanzu-framework contains the building blocks build atop the Tanzu platform. There’s also a Tanzu Community Edition Google Group, a slack channel is expected to be available soon. The Tanzu Community Edition development team will also host bi-weekly meetings on the latest developments, more information on this is available here.

How to get started?

How to get started? This is actually pretty simple: download Tanzu CE and install it to the operating system of choice. Homebrew and Chocolately are also supported installation options. The process is to first deploy a Kubernetes bootstrap cluster (running on your local machine),  then deploy a remote Management Cluster (on AWS, Azure or vSphere). The Management Cluster enables you to deploy one or more Workload Clusters. It’s also possible to directly deploy a Workload Cluster from the bootstrap cluster.

You can extend capabilities by adding packages to the cluster through the tanzu package command. More details on these packages and Tanzu package management here. The full documentation is also available on the tanzucommunityedition.io website.

Another option is to use the Tanzu CE sandboxes: a perfect opportunity to learn more about Tanzu. There are already almost 20 workshops available. Another very valuable resource when you want to get started with Kubernetes and Tanzu is Kube Academy. Kube Academy is a free Kubernetes and cloud native technology education program; courses comprise a series of short video lessons and dive into various topics.

Want to learn more?

Want to learn more? Check out Williams Lam’s article on Tanzu Community Edition or read through the interesting stuff at tanzucommunityedition.io. Also check the “VMware Tanzu Community Edition, a first look with Amanda and Josh” session at devopsloop.io on October 4th. You also might want to attend session “Explore New VMware Tanzu Frontiers [APP1482]“, “Get VMware Tanzu Up and Running in 10 Minutes on Your Local Workstation [DEM3166]” and “Testing Tanzu on the Desktop [CODE2759]” at VMworld 2021.