Open Source

Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard container orchestration tool. With its extensible API and wide industry acceptance, it is rapidly becoming the ‘platform to make platforms’. Increasingly, the entire software supply chain, from the building to the testing, to the hosting of software will take place in Kubernetes. With over a decade of experience in cloud native and open-source technology, ITQ bases its platform-engineering discipline around a fundamental and deep understanding of containers, Kubernetes and the CNCF ecosystem around it. We design, implement and support any solution or platform built on Kubernetes, whether license free and open source, or commercial Kubernetes distributions.  We work with, and have expertise in, a wide variety of Kubernetes distributions including SUSE Rancher, VMware VCF (TKGs), VMware Tanzu (TKGm, TKGi), and Redhat Openshift, along with all public-cloud distributions; Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Cilium is an open-source project that provides networking and security for containerized applications. It is designed to enhance the networking and security capabilities of container orchestration systems like Kubernetes. Cilium utilizes eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology to offer efficient and low-latency packet filtering, load balancing, and network visibility for containerized environments. It aims to simplify and improve the management of networking and security policies in large-scale, dynamic container deployments.

Backstage is an open-source platform developed by Spotify for managing the developer infrastructure and software development lifecycle. It helps organizations streamline their developer workflows by providing a unified interface for managing services, libraries, and tools used in the software development process. Backstage's key features include service cataloging, documentation, and a plugin-based architecture, making it easier for teams to discover and use internal tools and services, ultimately improving developer productivity.

Argo CD is an open-source set of tools for managing and automating workflows in Kubernetes. It includes Argo Workflows for orchestrating complex workflows, Argo CD for continuous delivery of applications, and Argo Events for handling events in a Kubernetes-native way. Argo simplifies the deployment and automation of tasks in containerized environments, enhancing workflow and application management.

Argo Workflows is an open source container-native workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs on Kubernetes. Argo Workflows is implemented as a Kubernetes CRD. Define workflows where each step in the workflow is a container. Model multi-step workflows as a sequence of tasks or capture the dependencies between tasks using a graph (DAG). Easily run compute intensive jobs for machine learning or data processing in a fraction of the time using Argo Workflows on Kubernetes. Run CI/CD pipelines natively on Kubernetes without configuring complex software development products.

Rancher is a powerful Kubernetes management tool to deploy, run and monitor Kubernetes clusters anywhere and on any provider. Rancher can provision Kubernetes from a hosted provider, provision compute nodes and then install Kubernetes onto them, or import existing Kubernetes clusters running anywhere. It enables at-scale Kubernetes fleet management. Rancher adds significant value on top of Kubernetes, first by centralizing authentication and role-based access control (RBAC) for all clusters, giving admins the ability to control cluster access and security globally. It enables detailed monitoring and alerting for clusters and their resources, ships logs to external providers, and integrates directly with Helm via the Application Catalog. If you have an external CI/CD system, you can plug it into Rancher, but if you don't, Rancher even includes ‘Fleet’ to help you automatically deploy and upgrade workloads. Rancher is a complete container management platform for Kubernetes, giving you the tools to successfully run Kubernetes anywhere.

Harvester is a modern hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution built for bare metal servers using enterprise-grade open-source technologies including Linux, KVM, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, and Longhorn. Designed for users looking for a flexible and affordable solution to run cloud native and virtual machine (VM) workloads in your datacentre and at the edge, Harvester provides a single pane of glass for virtualization and cloud native workload management. Harvester uses proven and mature open-source software (OSS) components to build virtualization instead of proprietary kernels that are kept hidden from view. As 100% open source, Harvester is free from the costly license fees of other HCI solutions. Plus, its foundation is based on existing technology such as Linux and kernel-based virtual machines.

Longhorn is an official CNCF project that delivers a powerful open-source distributed storage platform for Kubernetes that can run anywhere. When combined with Rancher, Longhorn makes the deployment of highly available persistent block storage in your Kubernetes environment easy, fast and reliable. Storage shouldn’t be complicated, and with Longhorn it’s not. Longhorn gives your teams a reliable, simple and easy-to-operate storage solution. Deployed with a single click from the Rancher application catalogue, it provides you with the ability to secure, provision and back up your storage across any Kubernetes cluster.

Crossplane is an open source, CNCF project built on the foundation of Kubernetes to orchestrate anything. Encapsulate automation, application of policies, permissions, and other guardrails behind a custom API to enable your customers to self-service without needing to become an infrastructure expert. Build control planes that manage all your infrastructure using familiar Kubernetes constructs instead of relying on a hard-to-manage scripting paradigm. Crossplane, an incubating CNCF project, enables platform engineers to orchestrate applications and infrastructure no matter where they run. Compose resources into custom abstractions that power a self-service platform experience where developers can provision and manage the infrastructure they depend on.

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that VMware actively supports. It empowers organizations to gather valuable insights into the performance and health of their systems and applications through a flexible and powerful data model.

Grafana is an open-source platform for monitoring and observability that seamlessly integrates with Prometheus. It provides visually appealing, customizable dashboards and robust alerting capabilities, aiding in real-time monitoring and analysis of cloud-native environments.

Harbor is an open-source container registry that provides secure storage and distribution of container images. It was initially developed by VMware and is now a CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) incubating project. Harbor offers features such as access control, vulnerability scanning, and image replication, making it a popular choice for organizations deploying containerized applications.

Contour is an open-source Kubernetes ingress controller developed by VMware. It helps manage inbound traffic to Kubernetes clusters, providing routing, load balancing, and SSL termination capabilities. Contour leverages the Envoy proxy and supports dynamic configuration, making it a flexible and scalable solution for managing ingress traffic.

VMware has contributed to the Cloud Native Buildpacks project, which is an open-source initiative focused on providing a standard way to build container images from source code. Buildpacks automate the creation of container images by analyzing source code and dependencies, streamlining the build process and enhancing portability across different platforms.

GitLab is an all-in-one DevOps platform for code management, CI/CD, collaboration, and more. It streamlines the software development lifecycle in a single integrated solution.

Istio is an open-source service mesh platform for microservices, providing features like load balancing, security, and monitoring without altering application code. It uses sidecar proxies to manage communication between services.

Velero is an open-source backup and restore tool for Kubernetes clusters. Formerly known as Heptio Ark, Velero was acquired by VMware and is now part of the VMware Tanzu portfolio. Velero allows organizations to take backups of Kubernetes resources and persistent volumes, enabling disaster recovery and migration scenarios.

VMware has been an active contributor and supporter of the Cloud Foundry open-source project, which is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for cloud-native applications. VMware's Pivotal Software (now part of VMware Tanzu) has been a driving force behind Cloud Foundry's development and adoption.

K3s is a CNCF sandbox project that delivers a lightweight yet powerful certified Kubernetes distribution. When used with Rancher, K3s is ideal for running production workloads across resource-restrained, remote locations or on IoT devices.

RKE2, also known as RKE Government, is Rancher's next-generation Kubernetes distribution. It is a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution that focuses on security and compliance within the U.S. Federal Government sector. This makes it ideal as the basis of any Enterprise Kubernetes Solution. RKE2 combines the best-of-both-worlds from RKE 1.x and K3s. From K3s, it inherits the usability, ease-of-operations, and deployment model. From RKE1, it inherits close alignment with upstream Kubernetes. The distribution runs standalone or integrated into Rancher, and is the preferred distribution to use with Rancher.