When to Use vSphere Pods and Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters

Using vSphere Pods or Tanzu Kubernetes clusters provisioned by the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service depends on your goals related to deploying and managing Kubernetes workloads on the Supervisor Cluster.

Use vSphere Pods if you are a vSphere administrator or DevOps engineer who wants to:

• Run containers without needing to customize a Kubernetes cluster.
• Create containerized applications with strong resource and security isolation.
• Deploy vSphere Pods directly on ESXi hosts.

Use Tanzu Kubernetes clusters provisioned by the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service if you are a DevOps engineer or developer who wants to:

• Run containerized applications on open-source, community-aligned Kubernetes software.
• Have control over the Kubernetes cluster, including root level access to the control plane and worker nodes.
• Stay current with Kubernetes versions without requiring infrastructure upgrades.
• Use a CI/CD pipeline to provision short-lived Kubernetes clusters.
• Customize the Kubernetes cluster, for example, install custom resource definitions, Operators, and helm charts.
• Create Kubernetes namespaces using the kubectl CLI.
• Manage cluster-level access control and configure PodSecurityPolicies.
• Create services of type NodePort.​
• Use HostPath​ volumes.
• Run privileged pods.