Prerequisites

Now that we’ve laid out the why and the what of VMware Tanzu, we’re ready to get our hands dirty solving some real-world problems. This book is geared toward software professionals, and there are some tools and concepts that this book assumes you know about. Don’t worry if you’re not strong across all of these areas as each chapter will walk you through step by step.

The Linux console and tools

You can follow along with most chapters in this book using a Windows machine, but experience dictates that things work much more smoothly if you use a Mac or a Linux workstation. There are numerous options available for Windows users, including virtual machines, dual-booting into Linux, or working from a cloud-based virtual machine. This book assumes you are comfortable with navigating a filesystem, finding and viewing files, and editing them with an editor such as Vim or nano.

Docker

This book is heavily geared toward containers. The primary way to interact with APIs that build and run containers is with the Docker CLI. You will need both a Docker daemon and the Docker CLI to work through some of the chapters in this book. It assumes that you are comfortable listing container images as well as running containers.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is at the core of the Tanzu portfolio. This book assumes you can stand up a Kubernetes cluster locally or on a public cloud provider. It also assumes that you are comfortable with the kubectl CLI to interact with a Kubernetes cluster. Finally, you should be able to read YAML Kubernetes manifests.

Workstation requirements and public cloud resources

Some of the tools discussed in this book can be run locally on your workstation, while others are better suited to the public cloud. Others require only a web browser and a pre-existing Kubernetes cluster.

If you want to run Tanzu Kubernetes Grid locally, a minimum of 32 gigabytes of RAM is strongly recommended. You may find that other tools, such as Tanzu Application Platform or Harbor, run best on a Kubernetes cluster provided by a public cloud provider. I highly recommend using the providers’ built-in budgeting tools to make sure that you don’t rack up an unexpected bill.

Now that you know what you’ll need, I encourage you to find a topic of interest and dive in. All Packt books are organized with self-contained chapters so you can work through the book front-to-back or jump straight to the topics that interest you.