Provisioning Backing Services for Applications

In the previous chapter, we saw how to build application container images with ample security and without much operational overhead using Tanzu Build Service (TBS). These container images are the essential building blocks to run our cloud-native applications on container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. We can deploy those container images on a Kubernetes cluster and run our applications. However, in real life, things are not that straightforward. In the majority of cases, business applications depend on backing services such as databases, queues, caches, and others. Additionally, there is an increasing trend to also deploy such off-the-shelf backing services as containers on Kubernetes-like platforms for various good reasons.

In this chapter, we will take a deep dive into VMware Application Catalog (VAC), which provides a secure, fast, and reliable way to use such open source backing services in a containerized environment...