Extending Terraform Automation for VMware Tanzu Mission Control

How TeraSky expanded Infrastructure-as-Code capabilities for TMC while building reusable tooling to streamline provider development.

Some technical consulting projects focus on implementing software. Others sit directly inside the product itself.

When VMware (now Broadcom’s VMware Division) needed to expand the integration between Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) and Terraform — the standard tool for managing IT infrastructure as code — they brought in TeraSky to serve as an extension of their internal product engineering organization.

Working side by side with VMware’s core developers, TeraSky expanded the official TMC Terraform Provider, giving enterprise customers automated control over more of their Kubernetes environments. While the new features provided immediate value to customers, the work also solved a broader engineering challenge: TeraSky built an automated schema converter that replaced manual code translation, streamlining VMware’s provider updates moving forward.

The Challenge

Tanzu Mission Control provides a central hub for managing Kubernetes clusters across public clouds and private data centers. As customer adoption grew, engineering teams wanted to manage more of TMC through code—including security policies, user permissions, cluster lifecycles, and data backups.

Expanding these capabilities wasn’t just a matter of writing new features. Every new Terraform option had to match VMware’s underlying system rules (APIs) precisely. Doing this translation manually across multiple coding layers was slow and repetitive, and it introduced the risk of small human errors that could break automated workflows.

The Solution

Acting as an embedded extension of VMware’s product engineering team, TeraSky extended the TMC Terraform Provider to support key operational tasks:

• Access Control & Policies: Automated the creation of custom user roles, permission templates, and security guardrails.
• Cluster Lifecycle & Adoption: Added support for registering management clusters, managing multi-version Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) environments, and importing existing clusters into TMC.
• Observability & Data Protection: Integrated automated backup workflows and connections to Tanzu Observability tools.

These updates allowed platform engineering teams to manage complex Kubernetes operations entirely through code, eliminating manual configuration steps.

The Innovation

While building the new features, TeraSky identified a recurring inefficiency: developers spent significant time hand-coding the translation layer between VMware’s API models and Terraform schemas.

To solve this, TeraSky built an internal accelerator called the Terraform Schema Converter.

Instead of requiring engineers to manually map data structures line by line, the tool automates the conversion process. This removed tedious manual work, reduced coding errors, and provided VMware with a reusable asset that accelerates future Terraform provider updates.

How the Engineering Work Delivered Value

Technologies Used

VMware Tanzu Mission Control | Terraform | Infrastructure as Code | GoLang | OpenAPI / Swagger | Kubernetes | Terraform Provider SDK | VMware Tanzu ecosystem

The Impact

The project gave VMware customers a much broader set of Infrastructure-as-Code capabilities for managing Kubernetes at scale. At the same time, the new converter tool simplified internal development, ensuring future features can be released faster and with greater consistency.
By delivering product-level code and developing reusable IP, TeraSky provided value well beyond traditional services, functioning as a true product engineering partner to strengthen VMware’s automation ecosystem for the long term.