Introducing Project Santa Cruz @ VMworld 2021

I was thrilled to finally be able to share the launch of Project Santa Cruz with the world today as part of VMworld’s Vision and Innovation Solution Keynote. The announcement has been a long time coming. Project Santa Cruz brings together the VMware secure access service edge (SASE) technology, SD-WAN, and Tanzu Mission Control to provide a scalable edge platform for containerized applications. In this blog post, we’ll take a deeper dive into the technical details of this groundbreaking solution.

Some highlights:

VMware SASE technology provides highly resilient and optimized network traffic across the WAN
Zero-touch, day-zero deployment at the edge
Orchestration for network and container infrastructure automation at scale
The ideal footprint for thin and medium edges

For day zero, it provides zero-touch deployment: edge sites need only to unpack the VMware SD-WAN Edge device from the shipping container and plug in some cables. The platform then connects to the VMware SD-WAN Orchestrator for initial provisioning. The next step is to connect it to Tanzu Mission Control so your Kubernetes platform team can begin to interact with it — providing namespaces and workspaces to your development teams as part of their global infrastructure platform.

In one platform, you have all the capabilities of the VMware SASE — including SD-WAN’s advanced routing capabilities — to the cloud and in between clouds, as well as the ability to provide multi-carrier connectivity for greater redundancy. VMware SASE offers URL filtering, secure web gateways, a cloud access security broker (CASB), anti-malware capabilities, and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS). It delivers situation-based, contextual security that assumes the least trust and conducts continuous authentication. This policy-driven approach gives enterprises a simplified way to handle management and operations. It also lets you leverage the same compute and the same devices you’re deploying at the edge to provide these capabilities to deploy and manage containerized applications.

*Caption: VMware SASE wi/ Comprehensive Capabilities*

These same VMWare SD-WAN Edge devices have been deployed in emergency-response vehicles — moving at over 100 mph — to deliver real-time camera and edge processing to central locations, allowing officials to manage high-impact, evolving public-safety situations. They were able to provide multi-carrier, consistent video at speed, even as vehicles passed between coverage areas.

By providing you a complete software and hardware solution, we can now empower you to serve consistent networking and application services to your customers, everywhere you and they need to be.

In today’s keynote demo, we and our partners from Intel demonstrated how to leverage Project Santa Cruz’s Edge platform, together with OpenVino, to take advantage of inference at the edge. One use case we demonstrated combines streaming camera data and local inference to identify whether everyone entering a corporate office was wearing a mask to comply with local COVID-19 restrictions. We also showed Project Santa Cruz’s platform identifying the items coming down a conveyor belt at a supermarket as part of our ongoing quest to free store clerks from needing to open the large book of different product types to look up something new.

We are excited to continue to drive the evolution of easy-to-roll-out and managed edge services at scale, with Project Santa Cruz as an important new member of the VMworld portfolio of capabilities.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid: bring your own host!

Today, we were also proud to share a sneak peek of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid’s “Bring Your Own Host” (BYOH) capability. This project introduces a cluster API provider to support customers who choose to use their own infrastructure. This satisfies a range of use cases — such as Hyper-V, highly advanced gaming, and finance kernel tuning — while still allowing use of our enterprise-grade Kubernetes across all of their environments.

Our demo (see video below) shows how a user can set their cloud provider to “BYOH” and then create a cluster on top of nodes that then can join Tanzu Mission Control for the Kubernetes platform team to administer. It can also provide namespace and workspace access to their developers.

More awesome VMworld 2021 sessions to attend: