VMware added Kubernetes operations support to its vRealize Cloud Management products along with a slew of other updates to its cloud management portfolio.

The portfolio includes both on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions, and the collective updates across the Automation, Operations, and Log Insights products make it easier for customers to consistently deploy and operate their applications, infrastructure, and platform services across IT environments, said Ken Lee, VMware’s senior director of product marketing. “It really cuts across both VM-based infrastructure, as well as increasingly the modern apps that are based on container-based infrastructure,” he said.

The updates to Automation 8.2 on-premises software and Automation Cloud, the SaaS version, focus on DevOps, automating private cloud setup, and self-provisioning Kubernetes. Specifically, the new automation capabilities include: role-based access control, expanded multi-tenant infrastructure and Day 2 actions support, and network automation with NSX policy APIs.

VMware also boosted its infrastructure-as-code capabilities with the introduction of VMware Cloud Templates as the templating engine for VMware Cloud infrastructure. This also includes management of Terraform configurations from the service catalog.

Automation also integrates with VMware Cloud Foundation 4 to simplify private cloud setup.

And finally, the update adds self-service provisioning of Kubernetes namespaces via the service catalog with support for VMware vSphere with Kubernetes.

“Automating infrastructure consumption is a very strong theme that we’re pushing in this release,” Lee said. So is helping customers modernize their environments using DevOps and Kubernetes, he added.

In March, VMware added new products to Tanzu, its Kubernetes portfolio, including Tanzu Application Catalog, which provides developers with a selection of open source software that can be customized and verified by VMware for use in production environments.

VMware also made available Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, which is a Kubernetes runtime that allows customers to install and run a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment on any infrastructure: data centers, public and private clouds, and at the edge.

And it embedded Kubernetes natively into vSphere 7, which provides the compute virtualization technology for VMware’s Cloud Foundation. By using Kubernetes as its control plane, developers and IT teams can use a single platform to manage both legacy workloads built on VMs and newer, containerized apps.

This idea of bridging the divide between developers and IT teams carries over into today’s vRealize updates. “So we make sure that customers who are using vRealize Automation can find those Tanzu Kubernetes clusters and namespaces in our catalog, and then be able to provision that in a very automated and efficient way,” Lee explained.

Operations, which also comes in an on-premises software form factor or a cloud-delivered SaaS, is the self-driving operations piece of the cloud management portfolio. It works across apps and infrastructure, and it uses artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics to help optimize performance, capacity, and cost across environments. It also does proactive planning, remediation, and helps ensure compliance.

Kubernetes operations advances is a big theme with the Operations 8.2 and Cloud update as well. This includes new and enhanced support for Kubernetes via integration with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and third-party distributions. The vendor says this will enable customers to auto-discover and monitor the health, performance, capacity, cost, and configuration of Kubernetes constructs.

The latest release also integrates with application performance monitoring tools such as AppDynamics, Datadog, and Dynatrace. And it will include new app discovery via integration with VMware vRealize Network Insight. These two capabilities can help customers predict, prevent, and more quickly remediate issues in the context of applications.

The vendor also improved metric-correlation and added near-real-time monitoring for VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which improves enterprise observability. VMware says this feature helps customers detect and fix performance and availability issues up to 15-times faster. Additionally, updates to native AWS management will unlock capacity calculations for EC2 instances and automatically import metrics into vRealize Operations for faster troubleshooting.

And finally, Operations updated its pricing and costing engine, including daily virtual machine (VM) cost granularity, improved metering capabilities, and pricing support for non-VMware vRealize Automation workloads to help customers to reduce costs.

Similarly, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.2 and vRealize Log Insight Cloud will also increase Kubernetes support, add deeper integration with VMware Cloud on AWS, and aim to improve usability for developers and IT departments.