On October 6, 2021, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced that Cluster API v1.0 Ready for production and official migration to v1beta1 API。 From the maturity level of the Alpha project, the Cluster API has demonstrated its increasing adoption, mature functions, and strong commitment to community and inclusive innovation.
The Cluster API is a Kubernetes project. It enables declarative management for Kubernetes and uses the API to easily create, configure, and update clusters. It is an end-to-end approach that simplifies the repetitive tasks of the Kubernetes life cycle while maintaining consistency and repeatability in a unified infrastructure.
From the beginning, the Cluster API has received contributions from many companies, including VMware Microsoft、Weaveworks、Google、Mattermost、IBM、RedHat、D2iQ、Equinix、Apple、Talos Systems、Spectro Cloud、 Daimler TSS, Ericsson Giant Swarm 、AppsCode、 Intel Twilio、New Relic、 Amazon, etc.
The main goal of the Cluster API is to make cluster lifecycle management tedious, that is, simple and easy. Cluster API and extensible model have verified production records; Over time, its goal is to further consolidate the foundation and build abstractions to simplify the end-user experience.
"The Cluster API project is the core of VMware's efforts to bring cloud native tools to a wider audience. VMware provides support for its enterprise customers in its transformation journey, while the Cluster API provides a consistent experience across infrastructure providers in a multi cloud world. By working with many other people in the community, we can easily deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters across various infrastructures in a community consistent way - from vSphere to public cloud to bare metal. The newly released Cluster Class feature further simplifies the work by providing a simpler interface to define and share cluster patterns. By creating a better toolset for platform teams, they can in turn provide more automated, fast, and simple internal products for application teams. The end result is that the application team delivers faster and more securely. "
—— Joe Beda, Chief Engineer of VMware Tanzu Product Family
"At VMware, we believe that competition makes each of us better, and collaboration makes the world better. We are proud to be able to travel with the Kubernetes community from the establishment of the Cluster API to the current production readiness. As a system, it fundamentally redefines the model for deploying and maintaining Kubernetes clusters, bringing the powerful functions of Kubernetes control mode into the field of large-scale infrastructure management. Hearty congratulations to the community for releasing v1.0. We look forward to the future of this project, which is not only a basic part of our Tanzu product line, but also an increasingly important part of the vibrant Kubernetes ecosystem. "
——Craig McLuckie, Vice President of VMware's Modern Applications and Management Business Group
Bring Your Own Host Infrastructure Provider
https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/cluster-api-provider-bringyourownhost
BYOH project is an open source project jointly initiated and participated by the Edge Computing Laboratory of VMware China R&D Center. The project was launched at the beginning of 2021, jointly promoted by colleagues from five time zones/countries around the world, and opened under VMware Tanzu in October 2021. The BYOH project is an infrastructure provider conforming to the definition of Cluster API v1beta1, which is used for physical/virtual machines with Linux installed.
In recent years, with the trend of large-scale applications on the cloud, more and more enterprise applications are migrated to the cloud infrastructure. But when it comes to choosing a cloud provider, enterprises naturally expect to have the flexibility to select, use and migrate on multiple clouds at the same time due to the consideration of technology evolution, business model and cost return. On the other hand, with the rapid development of edge computing and the increasingly tight evolution of cloud side collaboration, edge side applications are increasingly expected to operate and maintain in a cloud native manner and run in an edge native manner. Kubernetes based and various derivative projects and technical architecture solutions for the above needs have emerged one after another in recent years.
In this kind of architecture design, we found a common problem: An architecture on the edge usually has strong coupling with the implementation of a specific cloud 。 This may be the result of the convenience of technology evolution of manufacturers, but also some commercial factors. However, technology providers have designed and implemented architectures that are not completely compatible with each other, which has caused unnecessary trouble for enterprise users to adopt flexibility.
We expect to use the Cluster API, a Kubernetes cluster and fleet management method that may be implemented across the cloud and a unified interface, to extend down to the edge computing field, so as to realize the true neutrality of cloud side collaboration solutions.
BYOH's vision is: Users can set up Kubernetes management cluster and realize fleet management on any mainstream public cloud, hybrid cloud or private cloud. They can conveniently manage edge nodes and edge applications on any location, heterogeneous CPU platform, any OS supporting container, virtual or physical machine and its upstream community API interface in Kubernetes native mode.
Technically, BYOH can also be applied to non edge scenes.
Architecture diagram
BYOH is still a start-up project at the alpha stage. At present, it only provides Basic functions ：
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Support native Kubernetes manifest and API
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Support single node and multi node control plane clusters
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Support deployed Ubuntu 20.04 virtual machine and physical machine
This is to integrate BYOH project with VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE), and deploy and manage multi node, heterogeneous platform clusters Demo video 。
Try BYOH provider:
https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/cluster-api-provider-bringyourownhost/blob/main/docs/getting_started.md
How to test the BYOH provider locally:
https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/cluster-api-provider-bringyourownhost/blob/main/docs/local_dev.md
Interested industry peers are welcome to communicate with us, track the follow-up updates of BYOH projects, or provide direct code contributions.
