VMware’s Kubernetes focus continues unabated with the vendor today bolstering its broader Tanzu portfolio targeted at helping enterprises bridge the gap between development and production. The updates include application and infrastructure additions that are designed to ease operations in a Kubernetes environment and also further integrate VMware’s extensive Kubernetes properties.

For application development, VMware announced the general availability of its latest Tanzu Application Service (TAS) and moved its newly developed TAS on Kubernetes and Tanzu Build Service (TBS) into beta. For infrastructure, VMware pushed its Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition – which was formally known as its Enterprise PKS platform – into general availability.

Craig McLuckie, VP of VMware’s Modern Apps and Platform business unit, explained that the overarching TAS platform is designed to help enterprises digitize their operations. This involves tapping into VMware’s recent Pivotal acquisition to provide developers with the tools they are used to using, like Cloud Foundry, in a way that a product team can then use to operationalize that application. TAS provides an abstraction layer for both platforms that can then take away complications that come from working with Kubernetes, he explained.

“Kubernetes is still too dang complicated for a lot of engineers that, on their initial first blush, they find it a challenging experience to get the benefits from,” McLuckie explained. “So by bringing that Pivotal originated experience into the Kubernetes ecosystem, I think we're going to make Kubernetes much more accessible to a very wide array of teams.”

VMware moved closer to the Cloud Foundry ecosystem with the $2.7 billion acquisition of sister-company Pivotal last August. TAS is also taking over for what had been termed the Pivotal Application Service (PAS). It now includes an expansion of the number of workloads that can run on the platform.

TAS for Kubernetes is the next step in that it integrates Cloud Foundry, Istio, and Envoy into a single, "curated" package, McLuckie explained. It also provides for a more flexible deployment package that can run on a smaller footprint like in a local development environment or in an edge environment.

And then there is the Tanzu Build Service (TBS) that decouples the ability for TAS to view into a container environment so that it can be run across any Kubernetes distribution. It builds on Pivotal’s previous work with its Pivotal Build Service, which was unveiled last year. McLuckie noted that it uses the kpack resource controllers for Kubernetes that automates the creation and updating of container images from source code.

“This is really an effort to start looking at the PAS system as something that can be a little bit more modular, a little bit more composable and the Build Services is an incredibly important part of that,” McLuckie said. “We want to preserve that flow, but we want to make sure that the optionality is there, and this is the first step in that direction.”

VMware unveiled the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) platform last month. It’s designed as a Kubernetes runtime that allows customers to install and run a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment on any infrastructure, including data centers, public and private clouds, and at the edge.

With today’s update, it’s available directly on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and includes a command-line interface (CLI) to simplify the installation and multi-cluster operation of Kubernetes.

The TKG Integrated Edition adds more security and configuration features. This includes profile customization, resource tracking across clouds using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) tags, and greater cluster resiliency when running on top of VMware’s vSphere platform.

“It’s a way to get that same pattern and an operationally consistent way to deploy Kubernetes into the public cloud and to other destinations that you may want to go,” McLuckie said. “It's using Kubernetes as an abstraction that hides away the specifics of infrastructure, whether it's your private data center or whether it's a public cloud.”