TriggerMesh, VMware Promote Multicloud Integration for Kubernetes

Something that makes the cloud native market so fun for me is the strong sense of community and ecosystem. Across the industry, vendors appreciate the need to collaborate—often around open source and open specifications—to support businesses’ rapidly-changing DevOps needs.

Although we’re still relatively young and small, we’re proud of the “punch above our weight class” open source Knative contributions that earned TriggerMesh a top 5 spot next to Google, IBM, and VMware. We also actively work with the makers of other platforms and tools that our customers depend on to keep their DevOps practice running like clockwork.

Today, we are thrilled to announce our latest integration with VMware. This integration between TriggerMesh and Cloud Native Runtimes™ for VMware Tanzu™ carries tangible value for VMware Tanzu Advanced customers, and we think it provides the blueprint for how modern teams will build, deploy, manage, and, yes, integrate, cloud natively.

In a blog published today, VMware announced that Cloud Native Runtimes are now Generally Available. Tanzu Advanced customers can go to the Tanzu Network and download Cloud Native Runtimes to get started with serverless capabilities for Kubernetes today. 

With that download, Tanzu customers will also get direct access to the open source TriggerMesh Sources for Amazon Web Services (SAWs for short), making it easy to connect workloads on Cloud Native Runtimes with apps and services running on AWS. 

We can’t improve upon the way VMware summarized the purpose behind this integration:

We have integrated event sources created by TriggerMesh into Cloud Native Runtimes to address one of the largest challenges that organizations face in this increasingly hybrid and multi-cloud world: how to connect modern, event-driven applications that span multiple infrastructure technologies, software services, data centers, and clouds.

What is Cloud Native Runtimes and What Can You Do with it?

We encourage you to read the VMware blog for the full story. To summarize, Cloud Native Runtimes simplifies Kubernetes so developers and operators can get to value faster. It does this in at least three related ways.

First, Cloud Native Runtimes simplifies getting started building container-based software for Kubernetes and efficiently managing that software in various environments. Cloud Native Runtimes serving simplifies the way developers interact with Kubernetes, and it abstracts away much of the complexity for operators to deploy and manage applications. 

Second, Cloud Native Runtimes accelerates the development of container-based apps. Getting a URL endpoint to test your application on Kubernetes can be complicated because there are multiple steps to take and decisions to make that can alter the way your application behaves. With Cloud Native Runtimes, the process of getting an application endpoint consists of executing one command that deploys your application container along with all the routing and services you need to access it. 

Third, Cloud Native Runtimes provides simpler yet powerful app management capabilities for system operators. Building and running applications in stateless containers and scheduling them with Kubernetes opens up a whole new world of possibility when it comes to scaling, upgrading, and rolling them back. Cloud Native Runtimes’ Knative serving technology eliminates much of that complexity to make any ops team capable of advanced application lifecycle management on Kubernetes. Teams that leverage Cloud Native Runtimes can automatically scale their workloads in and out based on how many requests they are receiving, including down to zero when there is no traffic. 

What Does TriggerMesh Bring to the Party?

TriggerMesh is a cloud native integration platform, the only one born in the cloud and built with cloud native technologies. Because every enterprise is now multicloud, there is a pervasive need to connect enterprise services using cloud native approaches. Traditional ESB-based integration systems require significant knowledge of the applications being integrated, they often require expensive consultants, and they rely on legacy architectures. TriggerMesh is the only cloud native integration platform that offers a cloud-first approach and allows users to bring the on-premises world and the cloud world together.  

VMware Tanzu users that want to experience the power of TriggerMesh can start with our open source (Apache v2) Sources for Amazon Web Services (SAWs) that come out of the box with Cloud Native Runtimes. Using SAWs, you can quickly and easily consume events from your AWS services and send them to workloads running in your Tanzu Kubernetes cluster. Any AWS service can generate events, but consuming them with applications in different environments can require writing and maintaining a lot of AWS-specific code. TriggerMesh gives you a standardized mechanism for integrating AWS events (and with our full open source solution, for other cloud and on premises events) into your Tanzu application through Cloud Native Runtimes Knative eventing, without the need to alter your application or write specialized code.  

To showcase the powerful mutlicloud workflows TriggerMesh and Cloud Native Runtimes enable, VMware Technical Marketing Manager Myles Gray and TriggerMesh Engineer Jeff Neff created a demo video showing how TriggerMesh can connect data upload events from Amazon S3 with a machine learning app built using Cloud Native Runtimes and TensorFlow Serving from the Tanzu Application Catalog. 

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In this hypothetical use case, an industrial operation photographs vehicle license plates as they enter a facility. Every time a vehicle enters, its license plate photo is uploaded by the camera to an S3 bucket. Each upload triggers an event that is routed through TriggerMesh to the TensorFlow application running on Kubernetes, where the photographic data is converted to text. The license plate number is then recorded in a Google Sheet along with other details like the time of capture. This data can then be easily compared with an allowlist, for instance, to automate and accelerate physical security operations.

TriggerMesh Enterprise Extends Event-Driven Integrations Across Your Entire Business

For enterprises looking to integrate non-AWS Sources into their cloud native application integrations, TriggerMesh offers a number of proprietary Sources to seamlessly connect all your key systems and data. Some of our proprietary Sources include Azure Activity Logs, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Event Hubs, Google PubSub, GitHub, GitLab, Google Storage, Microsoft Active Directory, OCI Metrics, OracleDB, Salesforce, Slack, VMware vSphere, and Zendesk.

Similarly, with a licensed version of TriggerMesh you can send events to application Targets other than Kubernetes workloads. Some of our proprietary Targets include AWS S3, Kinesis, Lambda, SNS, and SQS, Confluent, Datadog, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud Run, Google Sheets, Hasura, InfraJS, Jira, Logz.io, OpenShift Serverless, OracleDB, Salesforce, SendGrid, Slack, Splunk, Tekton, Twilio, and Zendesk.

To conclude, we applaud the VMware team for the powerful capabilities they are bringing to enterprises in Tanzu Advanced and Cloud Native Runtimes. And we are thrilled that our open source SAWs are integrated with Cloud Native Runtimes so Tanzu customers can get a taste of the powerful simplicity TriggerMesh brings to multicloud event-driven integrations.

When you’re ready for the full TriggerMesh experience, head over to GitHub or check out our supported editions.