Deploy and Configure Kubeapps on VMware Tanzu™ Community Edition ¶

Introduction ¶

VMware Tanzu™ Community Edition (TCE) is a full-featured, easy-to-manage Kubernetes platform for learners and users. It is a freely available, community supported, open source distribution of VMware Tanzu that can be installed and configured in minutes on your local workstation or your favorite cloud.

Kubeapps provides a cloud native dashboard to deploy, manage, and upgrade applications on a Kubernetes cluster. It is a one-time install that gives you a number of important benefits, including the ability to:

  • browse and deploy packaged applications from public or private repositories
  • customize deployments through an intuitive user interface
  • upgrade, manage and delete the applications that are deployed in your Kubernetes cluster
  • expose an API to manage your package repositories and your applications

Kubeapps can be configured with public catalogs, such as the VMware Marketplace™ catalog, the Bitnami Application Catalog or with private Helm repositories such as ChartMuseum or Harbor. It also integrates with VMware Application Catalog , which provides an enterprise-ready Helm chart catalog.

This guide walks you through the process of configuring, deploying and using Kubeapps on a VMware Tanzu™ Community Edition cluster of your choice. It covers the following tasks:

  • Selection and deployment of the appropriate TCE cluster type
  • Configuring an identity management provider in the cluster
  • Configuring access control in Kubeapps
  • Deploying and configuring Kubeapps in the TCE cluster
  • Management of applications through Kubeapps using the TCE catalog

Intended Audience ¶

This guide is intended for the following user roles:

  • System administrators who want to install Kubeapps on a VMware Tanzu™ Community Edition cluster and use it to deploy and manage applications from any package repository.
  • Application administrators and developers who want to use Kubeapps to deploy and manage modern applications in a Kubernetes environment.
  • Any user willing to play around with Kubeapps and TCE

In-depth knowledge of Kubernetes is not required.

Tutorial index ¶

The tutorial is organized in the following sections:

  1. TCE cluster deployment preparation
  2. Deploying a managed cluster or Deploy an unmanaged cluster
  3. Preparing the Kubeapps deployment
  4. Deploying Kubeapps
  5. Further documentation for managing applications in Kubeapps

Begin ¶

Begin the tutorial by preparing your TCE cluster deployment .