Home > Servers > Modular Servers > White Papers > Reference Architecture: Machine Learning Containers on PowerEdge MX and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 with Tanzu > VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu
Modern applications bring new challenges, and containers offer extensive flexibility for building, deploying and managing modern apps. VMWare Cloud Foundation 4.0 with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) provides a ubiquitous hybrid cloud platform for traditional enterprise applications and modern applications. Based on a proven and comprehensive software- defined stack including VMware vSphere with Tanzu Kubernetes, VMware vSAN, VMware NSX-T Data Center, and VMware vRealize Suite, Cloud Foundation provides a complete set of secure software-defined services for compute, storage, network security, Kubernetes management, and cloud management. The result is an agile, reliable, efficient infrastructure that offers consistent operations across private and public clouds. Also, Cloud Foundation contains built-in automated lifecycle management to simplify the software stack administration, from initial deployment on PowerEdge MX to patching and upgrading.
Key benefits of running apps on VMware Cloud Foundation included:
Kubernetes is the main control plane and central API for practically everything built further up the stack. There are a few reasons for this decision:
To make it even easier to adapt Kubernetes - VMware released a Kubernetes support in the vSphere 7.0 release. Along with the deep vSphere integration for configuration and management, VMware provides required Kubernetes integration services like container networking or persistent storage support for containers. Kubernetes adoption is also streamlined by providing a Docker image registry (based on open-source Harbor project). Support for user authentication using vSphere or any SSO provider makes it ready for integration into existing enterprise systems.
To speed deployment and time to solution of an on-premises data science platform, the reference architecture from VMware is a perfect starting point to build your own solution: