We aren’t done with 2022 yet, but phew! This was a busy year for the VMware Tanzu Mission Control team. In the two short years since VMware introduced Tanzu Mission Control, the Kubernetes management hub has evolved rapidly to meet industry trends and changing customer needs with important new features, such as data protection, lifecycle management capabilities, GitOps automation, and integration across the VMware portfolio, to name a few.

2022 was another year of innovation and growth for SUSE’s Enterprise Container Management business. We introduced significant upgrades to our Rancher and NeuVector products, launched new open source projects and matured others. Exiting 2022, Rancher remains the industry’s most widely adopted container management platform and SUSE remains the preferred vendor for enabling enterprise cloud native transformation. Here’s a quick look at a few key themes from 2022.

This blog will discuss federated Kubernetes installations. Why and when we should use them and provide a working example of such a setup on AWS’s EKS. This blog post includes working code examples. As engineers with a never ending task list – which only grows as we strive for the next best thing we can add to our system – context is vital.

When moving production workloads to a new containerized environment, application traffic management (ATM) can become complex. This is especially true for organizations that are transitioning workloads to Kubernetes, as managing traffic requires load balancing and configuring other Kubernetes networking components, such as ingress and ingress controllers.

Automation can reduce the complexity of Kubernetes deployment and management, enabling organizations to devote their energies to creating business value rather than wrestling with their Kubernetes infrastructure.

Pods are ephemeral. And they are meant to be. They can be seamlessly destroyed and replaced if using a Deployment. Or they can be scaled at some point when using Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA). This means we can’t rely on the Pod IP address to connect with applications running in our containers internally or externally, as the Pod might not be there in the future.

This article was originally published in The New Stack and is reposted here with permission. A Helm chart can simplify our lives and enable us to see what is happening with our K3s cluster using an external system. Lightweight Kubernetes, known as K3s, is an installation of Kubernetes half the size in terms of memory footprint. Do you need to monitor your nodes running K3s to know the status of your cluster?

Kubernetes administrators and platform operators want quick access to information to help identify, troubleshoot, and track what happens on their Kubernetes clusters at any given time. However, lack of user attributes in events and audit logs can make it difficult for them to know who triggered an action, so VMware Tanzu Mission Control is expanding visibility into that data to fast-track remediation.