As one of Germany’s leading providers, Medialine offers fully managed services in a multi-cloud world. In addition to offering services on Microsoft Azure, cloud offerings based on Cloud Director play an important role within their ISO-certified data center.
With an increasing number of customers requesting modern container workload orchestrated by Kubernetes, an extension to the existing Cloud Director environment was required. The goal was to provide Kubernetes as a service within minutes, addressing one of the reasons why many customers consumed hyperscaler services in the past. comdivision’s architects Sascha Schwunk and Fabian Lenz were designated to finding and implementing a proper solution.
Existing customers were facing the fact that creating and maintaining a Kubernetes cluster from the official community binaries was very time-consuming. A better solution needed to be integrated into Medialine's Cloud Director offering. One that would allow customers to create, scale and keep Kubernetes clusters up to date themselves.
After completing the initial workshops, it quickly became clear that Medialine shall utilize VMware Tanzu to offer Kubernetes as a service. VMware Tanzu is a platform for building, running and managing modern applications, designed for cloud-native environments and adding further value.
By using VMware’s Container Service Extension, the capabilities of VMware Tanzu can be integrated into Cloud Director and offered as a self service to Medialine’s customers. During the deployment, a proper network design was created based on NSX and NSX-Advanced Load Balancer to ensure that cloud-native workloads could communicate with ‘legacy’ applications within the customer’s organization.
Medialine’s Cloud Director offering is now capable of providing Kubernetes as a service. Existing tenants can simply log in to the Cloud Director console and operate Kubernetes clusters. If required, customers can additionally request Tanzu Mission Control by Medialine to get an holistic view of all Kubernetes clusters.“If a customer wants to quickly evaluate the power of VMware Tanzu, we can enable them to do so within minutes,” said Jan Philipp Hoepfner, the responsible DevOps engineer of the cloud platform at Medialine. “We are able to provide our customers with the opportunity to experience VMware Tanzu within minutes through our new Kubernetes-as-a-service offering.”
