Platform9 Managed Kubernetes and Tanzu Community Edition – Features Chart
In this post we are going to take a look at the differences between Tanzu Community Edition and Platform9 Managed Kubernetes Free Tier. As a complement to Platform9 Managed Kubernetes and Tanzu Community Edition, this is a list of notable features between the two products.
| Feature / Activity | VMware Tanzu CE | PMKFT |
| Scaling restrictions | No | Up to 20 nodes w/o actual validation on the number of nodes being attached |
| Hosted Sandbox | Limited to 15-minute workshop for trying CE, which provides pre-created k8s cluster and tutors about basic kubectl commands. | Read-only sandbox for a quick tour of PMK UI. |
| Suggested minimum to run a local cluster | x86 architecture 6 GB RAM 15 GB disk 4 CPUs Docker Kubectl | X86 architecture 16 GB RAM 30 GB Disk 4 CPUs |
| CLI | Tanzu CLI has more functionality than what is in the UI wizard. Had to install Tanzu CLI dependencies manually. | PF9 doesn’t have a CLI to control the product but does have a CLI to onboard/manage cluster nodes (pf9ctl). Which has a self-contained install (for dependencies). |
| Onboarding nodes / creating cluster with Docker | Supports Docker-based work for bare-metal machines. Supports Mac, Windows, and Linux. No resource pre-requisites checker is implemented, which introduces the possibility of failures after going ahead with the installation. Installation takes a huge amount of time. The errors were not clear. | Does not support Docker based deployment. Supports deployment on VMs / BMs. In case of error, an appropriate log location is provided. |
| UI | Minimal UI, mainly to show installation progress. Mimics CLI output. UI is started and accessible only after executing a Tanzu CLI command. Not readily accessible. | Full-fledged UI with interactive capabilities. |
| Infrastructure providers | Hypervisors: vSphere Desktop: Docker Cloud providers: AWS and Azure | Hypervisors: anything supporting OVA format Desktop: Linux VMs, baremetal Cloud providers*: AWS, Azure *also importing clusters from AKS, EKS & GKE. |
| Creating a cluster with AWS | No IAM checker for checking policies for AWS account implemented. Does not work out of the box. AWS CLI has to be installed. | IAM checker is part of pf9ctl, and can also be run from Mac & Windows machines. It provides clear requirements of role permissions/policies and compares existing policies with required ones. pf9ctl does not support creating clusters using cloud providers. Need to do it via UI. |
| Available apps | These packages are available for ready deployment: Prometheus, Grafana, Cert-Manager, Ingress Controller (Contour), external DNS, Fluentbit, Gatekeeper, Harbour, Knative, CSI, Multus CNI, Velero (disaster recovery) | App Catalog currently has these apps: NGINX Ingress Controller, Cert-Manager, FluentD, Fluentbit, hostpath. Also has add-ons (infrastructure apps) like Prometheus, Grafana, MetalLB etc. |
| CNI | Default: Antrea | Default: Calico |
| Community Support | Slack channel in Kubernetes workspace. Also supports Google Groups. | Dedicated slack workspace. |
| k8s versions supported (as of this publication) | 1.21.2 1.20.8 1.19.12 | 1.17.9 1.18.10 1.19.6 1.20.5 1.21.3 |
| Binary size | Tanzu CLI: 34 MB | pf9ctl: 41 MB |
| Code open sourced? | Yes for both Tanzu CLI and Tanzu backend | No |
| Development language | Golang | Golang |
Conclusion
Hopefully this post has cleared up some of the differences and will provide useful comparisons to help with your decision. If you would like to discuss some of the information in this post further, feel free to reach out to us on Slack.
- Platform9 Managed Kubernetes and Tanzu Community Edition – Features Chart - April 4, 2022
- Load Balancing Multi-Cloud, Multi-Cluster Workloads in Kubernetes - January 10, 2022
- The Six Most Popular Kubernetes Networking Troubleshooting Issues - January 10, 2022