Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Dell Technologies Cloud - Subscription Model

Dell Technologies on Tuesday rolled out a new subscription-based model for hybrid cloud deployments, available with the Dell EMC VxRail. The new offering includes the hardware and software, as well as the services necessary for relatively quick deployments, such as support, deployment and asset recovery services. 
Customers can sign up for a one-year or three-year agreement, priced on a per node, per month basis for as low as $70/node per day. Deployments can take as little as two weeks, Dell said.  
Dell claims the new offering is the "fastest hybrid cloud deployment" in the industry. 
The new offering expands the Dell Technologies Cloud portfolio and is part of a broader portfolio of consumption-based and as-a-service offerings called Dell Technologies on Demand
Dell's hybrid cloud strategy aims to knit its data center and hybrid cloud technologies with public cloud providers. VMware is the linchpin to the Dell's cloud effort, offering the software glue to a cloud platform that can span internal and public resources. VxRail enables deep integration across the VMware ecosystem.

Back Up, Restore and Migrate Kubernetes with Velero

Part of the Tanzu cloud native portfolio, VMware’s Velero is an open source project that provides backup, restore and migration capabilities for Kubernetes. Originally developed by Heptio and known as Ark, Velero is supported by Dell’s PowerProtect, allowing PowerProtect users to back up their Kubernetes clusters.

Velero is a command-line tool that backs up clusters and restores them in case of loss, migrates cluster resources to other clusters, and replicates a production cluster to development and testing clusters. It consists of a server that runs on a cluster and the command-line client that runs locally. A recent Kubernauts post about Velero stated it well:
“[Velero] takes snapshots of your cluster’s Persistent Volumes using your cloud provider’s block storage snapshot features, and can then restore your cluster’s objects and Persistent Volumes to a previous state.”
The technology was built in Go. Velero has a Go client SDK that integrates with the Kubernetes API,  using plugins to provide capabilities for syncing across multiple cloud environments.
“We have a system of syncing,” said Campos. “Once you create a backup, it is continually syncing. So whenever you want to restore, your backups are up to date.”
The Velero community has about 3,300 stars on GitHub, owing in part to the ability to provide immediate backup, adding a degree of safety and the ability to restore Kubernetes clusters.

Velero Use Cases

Through its plug-in capability, Velero is a foundation technology for backing up Kubernetes environments, both in the cloud and on-premises. Customers don’t want to be locked in, said Spoonemore. “They use Velero to migrate from one cloud provider to another cloud provider.” Velero’s extensibility allows the Power Platform to use plugins that can work in AWS, Google, Digital Ocean and Portworx, to name a few.
Velero is suited for disaster recovery use cases, as well as for snapshotting application state, prior to performing system operations on a cluster. Velero backs up the pods and the clusters but also the data in the persistent volumes. Backups can be done selectively: A big cluster can be backed up, for example, by namespace and/or label. PowerProtect software uses Velero and puts it into a single stack. VMware’s Tanzu Mission Control is used to manage across a fleet of clusters. It integrates Velero across Tanzu for backup, restoration and migration of Kubernetes clusters. It allows for data protection and leverages Velero to back up K8s resources.

VMware Tanzu for K8s Architects

Recently at VMworld 2019 US, VMware announced a tech preview* of VMware Tanzu Mission Control, a way to bring consistency and control to all your Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they are running. The Kubernetes Architecture team at VMware focuses on getting customers into production with Kubernetes, and VMware Tanzu Mission Control is a much-needed tool to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters. While Kubernetes itself tends to treat the namespace as a logical boundary between groups of resources, many customers opt instead to treat entire clusters as isolation mechanisms between workloads and have asked VMware for a way to manage the many clusters they deploy.
VMware Tanzu Mission Control
To take it further, different workloads have different needs, which means large organizations could have a myriad of different infrastructure: public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal. Enterprises could have an even more granular choice in each type of infrastructure: bare metal with SSDs, cloud driven by spot instances, and on and on. This is why we’re so excited about VMware Tanzu Mission Control: It will provide a tool to manage your Kubernetes clusters across this matrix of infrastructure. So, of all the features, which are we most excited about?

Centralized Kubernetes Lifecycle Management

With just a few clicks, VMware Tanzu Mission Control will provide a clean way to manage the lifecycle of cloud-hosted Kubernetes clusters. If enterprises are running any flavor of upstream-conformant Kubernetes on bare metal or VMware vSphere in the data center or have managed Kubernetes services in the public cloud, they will be able to bring those clusters under centralized management with VMware Tanzu Mission Control.

Unified Access Management

Companies working with multiple clusters have to track which teams have access to which clusters. Although Active Directory groups can make access management a bit easier, most companies we’ve worked with that deploy many clusters have to get creative around cluster-access management. With VMware Tanzu Mission Control, platform operations teams will be able to manage access to all their Kubernetes clusters in one place.

Security and Configuration Management

If authentication and authorization are problems at scale, security policies and network policies with multiple clusters are also problems. VMware Tanzu Mission Control will allow platform operators to manage cluster policies at a macrolevel by grouping many Kubernetes clusters together in workspaces divided by application team, the stages of software application development, or other ways that make sense to an organization. After the clusters are grouped, you will be able to apply security policies and configuration policies to all those clusters at once.

Backup and Restores with Velero

Velero allows operators to back up important data from Kubernetes clusters, including the underlying volumes. Through VMware Tanzu Mission Control, platform operators will be able to back up multiple important clusters at once as dictated by policy.
With the introduction of VMware Tanzu as a portfolio of products and services, we are transforming the way enterprises build software on Kubernetes. As organizations increase self-service and developer velocity through multiple Kubernetes clusters, VMware Tanzu Mission Control will offer a powerful set of capabilities that will allow platform operators to manage modern API-driven infrastructures.
To find out more about VMware Tanzu Mission Control, check out the web page or watch this video.