Tanzu Community Edition: A Fallen Open Source Project

In a sudden and unexpected move, VMware has discontinued its open source project, Tanzu Community Edition, and replaced it with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for free in non-commercial environments up to 100 cores. This decision has left the community in shock and many are wondering what led to this outcome.

Tanzu Community Edition was an awesome open source implementation of Tanzu, which relied on cluster API to provision Kubernetes clusters on various infrastructure providers. It was known for its ease of use and automated process for spinning up clusters with control plane and worker nodes. The project had a small but active team within VMware, and many contributors from the open source community.

However, doubts started to form when VMware announced that Broadcom was likely to acquire the company in May 2022. Many resignations followed, including that of Joe Beda, one of the founders of Heptio and a key contributor to Tanzu Community Edition. After this point, activity in the project’s Slack channel slowed down significantly, and there were no new releases or answers to questions.

The latest version of Tanzu Community Edition was 0.12.1, which was released just before Kubecon 2022 in Valencia, Spain. John McBride, one of the main contributors to the project, announced his resignation along with several other key contributors. This led to a sense of unease among the community, and it became clear that something was amiss.

Fast forward to late October, when I opened Slack to start my workday, I found out that Tanzu Community Edition had been retired and replaced with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for free in non-commercial environments up to 100 cores. The project page had been updated to reflect this change.

The reason behind this move is not entirely clear, but it seems that VMware has decided to focus on its commercial offerings instead of maintaining an open source project. The company has offered Tanzu Kubernetes Grid as a free download for non-commercial environments, which is a significant change from the previous offering.

As someone who is active in the community and uses Tanzu Community Edition for my work, I am saddened by this news. However, the silver lining is that we now have access to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for free, which should be more than enough to play with.

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In conclusion, the retirement of Tanzu Community Edition is a significant change in the open source community. While it is unfortunate to see such an awesome project come to an end, we can hope that the community will continue to thrive and innovate with new offerings from VMware.