Organizations are seeking more agility to accelerate their business growth. Developing applications for internal or external usage can directly or indirectly impact that growth. It is important to provide agility to developers for them to write these applications. That’s why public cloud services are attractive. Developers can consume services right away by deploy a data service (e.g database) and connect it to their applications. They don’t have to worry about the infrastructure but instead focus only on developing the application. Bringing that flexibility into the datacenter will allow organizations to provide agility while maintaining security.
VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu (previously vSphere with Kubernetes or Projet Pacific) is a platform capable of hosting applications running in virtual machines and applications running in Kubernetes Pods (containers). It also provides networking services, storage, registry, backup and restore services for those applications. Now, it also incorporates data services.
At the time of writing, two solutions were added: Minio and Cloudian. They are two object storage solutions compatible with S3 API. Two other are currently being integrated: Dell EMC ObjectScale, a object storage compatible with S3 and Datastax, a NoSQL database based on Cassandra. There are more integrations to come.
How is it revolutionary?
Unlike the majority of traditional/classic/monolith applications, modern applications also called Cloud Native or Scalable apps do not rely on the infrastructure to optimize their performance and to provide resiliency. They use their own mechanisms for availability, performance and no matter what infrastructure they’re running on. Of course, the infrastructure is essential but only to consume resources like processors, memory or I/O. These applications are often SNA (Shared Nothing Architecture). Each instance of an application uses its own resources on a distinct server and the application distributes the data between these servers. Reading and writing data is distributed for better performances and resilience while taking in consideration a potential loss of a server or a site.
On a physical infrastructure (without virtualization), it’s easy, each instance has its own server and its own resources. However, it creates a financial issue as the servers are dedicated to that usage. It’s not optimal unless all the resources always being consumed. It’s rarely the case.
On a virtual infrastructure, the resources are shared hence not used resources can be use by other applications. It also allows eliminate hardware compatibility issues and to take advantage of other benefits brought by virtualization. Nevertheless, there’s a constraint for SNA applications as the instances are virtualized. We need to ensure these instances and the generated data are distributed on different virtualised servers in case of of server failure.
VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu coupled with vSAN Data Persistence platform module (vDPp) is the answer to this problem. Partner editors are able to take advantage of the platform to provide “as a Service” solutions. They can do so by developing an operator to automate the installation, the configuration and simplify keeping it operational.
The service is up and running in one click
vDPp is aware of the infrastructure, the application knows how to get the best performances and availability. The operator thereby distributes the required number of instances on different virtualized servers.
This vSAN storage policy ensures data protection and keeps the application instance and its data on the same virtualization host
During maintenance operations, the application is informed about the decommission of a virtualization server. vDPp also proactively communicates with the application if the disks start showing signs of failure.
Developers consume these services via APIs and stick to only developing their application. They can use an resilient and performant on-demand data service.
In Conclusion,
VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu platform coupled with vSAN Data persistence provide great agility to keep the data services operational. Thanks to that, developers can focus solely on application development while keeping on using their traditional tools. They have a cloud platform as it exists on public cloud.
VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu should be seen as a complete platform designed for the development and hosting of traditional and modern applications with integrated on-demand services.
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