VMware Retires Tanzu Community Edition

Last year in October, VMware released VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). Aimed to be a "freely available, community-supported, open source distribution of VMware Tanzu".

Today they've announced that they've killed it.

Over the past year I've played around with TCE and been happy with the ability to spin up a Tanzu cluster on my laptop to test out both Kubernetes features and Tanzu specific stuff which later could be applied to the full-fledged Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.

Since this summer it became clear that the work done on TCE had kind of slowed down. The latest release available came May 18th and as we all know, things are moving fast in this space.

So what does VMware offer instead?

From the TCE website: "VMware has decided to offer a free download of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid in place of VMware Tanzu Community Edition"

This is kind of a good thing. TCE and TKG wasn't equal, it had it's differences. As with merging the TKG version delivered in "vSphere with Tanzu" a.k.a. TKGs and the "multi-cloud" version, a.k.a. TKGm, it makes sense concentrating things in one distribution.

The TKG offered for free is for non-commercial use and can be used in up to 100 core environments with no support. This all makes sense, and the only downside to this is that you'll need a Customer Connect account as opposed to TCE which could be downloaded directly.

To me, the real downside here is that we no longer can run Tanzu on our laptops and we'll have to revert to other solutions like Minikube or kind. Which might result in a smaller community of Tanzu users outside of the "vSphere infra" community, i.e. developers with little or no background in the VMware suite of products. And as pointed out by a fellow vExpert, since it's a commercial product it'll probably slow down the pace of innovation of TKG.

And another downside of course is that I have quite a few blog posts to update now with this news...

For more information VMware has put together a FAQ over on the TCE website