Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a hot topic, but what exactly does it entail? And do you have to follow the principles to a T in order to achieve benefits from it? If you’re searching for answers to these common questions, look no further. In this episode of the Cloud & Culture podcast, VMware Tanzu’s Hannah Foxwell explains the what, why, and how of SRE—from key principles (such as SLI, SLO, and error budgets) to real-life examples of enterprise adoption.

In previous blog posts, we’ve talked about the process of setting up vSphere with Tanzu (see our quick start guide) and creating your first Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster (TKC). As a vSphere Administrator, you might be saying to yourself, “This is cool and all, but what’s next? What’s an easy application to deploy?” The easiest target is the standard NGINX Kubernetes deployment, but that’s very basic.

What made the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns so novel in recent history is that they were true existential threats to many businesses. This was not a case of getting “Ubered,” whereby the erosion of revenue can take years to fully materialize. Rather, this was a case of companies needing to—sometimes literally overnight—expand their digital operations and adopt new business models.

With the acceleration of digitalization, enterprises across all verticals are running more and more distributed applications deployed on multiple clouds. This poses a new set of challenges when it comes to maintaining, updating, and securing these distributed applications. Our customers are looking for solutions to connect and secure their applications for rapid delivery with minimal disruptions and code changes.

The upstream Kubernetes community recently discovered a security issue—CVE-2020-8554— affecting multitenant clusters that allows anyone who is able to create a ClusterIP service and set the spec.externalIPs field to intercept traffic to that IP address. There is no patch for this issue yet, and it can currently only be mitigated by restricting access to the vulnerable features.

We are pleased to announce that Spring Cloud Data Flow for Kubernetes 1.2.0 is now generally available. This commercial offering bundles the latest open source release of Spring Cloud Data Flow with several new features designed to boost developer productivity. The new product is supported by VMware as part of VMware Spring Runtime.

Each Kubernetes release is driven by the community. The features that are delivered, along with the release cadence, are guided by Kubernetes contributors. This year presented a number of challenges that impacted the community and, as a result, the Kubernetes 1.19 release was prolonged and saw a large focus on stability, both in terms of testing and features delivered. After this prolonged release, there was just enough time to get one more release out for the year!

VMware Tanzu Greenplum is a massively parallel processing (MPP) data platform based on the open source Greenplum Database project. It’s designed to run the full gamut of analytical workloads, from BI to AI. Because enterprise data lives and grows throughout an organization, it is suboptimal to copy large data sets between different systems as they aren’t able to perform fast enough, scale high enough, or offer the right features.

We’re thrilled to announce that VMware Pivotal Labs is now an AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partner for app modernization and software development. VMware Pivotal Labs is the software consulting arm of VMware Tanzu, itself a long-time Advanced AWS Technology Partner.

We are excited to announce integration between Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service, a component of vSphere 7 with Tanzu. With this integration, customers can centrally provision and manage the lifecycle of Tanzu Kubernetes clusters on vSphere 7 across multiple vCenter Server instances and/or multiple data centers via Tanzu Mission Control.

Today is another exciting day in the cloud native computing ecosystem, with AWS announcing Amazon EKS Distro—an upstream aligned Kubernetes distribution. EKS Distro offers consistency for customers who are deploying their apps on the managed Amazon EKS service and are looking for an on-premises deployment. A few things stand out about this effort, and we are excited to continue working with AWS to help enterprises realize the full potential of Kubernetes.