Accelerate Application Delivery with VMware Tanzu Hub Integrations, AI, and More

November 7, 2023 Dan Naparstek

VMware Tanzu Hub is the common platform across the VMware Tanzu portfolio that helps you develop, operate, and optimize modern applications. As announced at VMware Explore Las Vegas, VMware Tanzu Application Platform has been expanded into a product family to include both development and platform engineering capabilities, following the VMware belief that developer and infrastructure agility are inextricably linked. The Tanzu Application Platform product family includes VMware Tanzu Developer Portal, VMware Tanzu Secure Supply Chains, VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations and its existing capabilities, and an exciting new capability in Application Engine.  

We also introduced another new product family, VMware Tanzu Intelligence Services, designed to supercharge Day 2 operations for platform engineering and operations. This product family includes VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, VMware Tanzu Guardrails, VMware Tanzu Insights, and Tanzu Application Catalog. Underlying all of this is VMware Tanzu Hub, envisioned as the common platform across both Tanzu Application Platform and Tanzu Intelligence Services. As part of that vision, new services continue to be integrated with the VMware Tanzu Hub platform.  

Today, we are excited to announce the upcoming availability of Tanzu CloudHealth features in the Tanzu Hub platform. These features will bring the industry-leading cost optimization functionality of Tanzu CloudHealth to the platform, which will further augment the visibility, actionable insights, governance, and collaboration from which users currently benefit. Available features will include the Tanzu CloudHealth Cost History Report, rightsizing, anomaly detection, and a brand-new Cloud Smart Summary (Read this article to learn more about each feature). 

These features from Tanzu CloudHealth in Tanzu Hub will expand on existing products in the platform from the Tanzu Intelligence Services family. For example, Tanzu Guardrails is a tool that offers unified multi-cloud governance and policy management in Tanzu Hub. In addition, at VMware Explore in Las Vegas, we announced the initial availability of Tanzu Insights, a unified tool that delivers explainable AI/ML-based insights for deeper and contextual troubleshooting that is also built on top of Tanzu Hub.  

In addition to these developments with the products in the Tanzu Intelligence Services family, we’re thrilled to be announcing several updates and new additions to the Tanzu Hub platform itself, including the following: 

  • Intelligent Assist (initial availability)
  • New and intuitive platform navigation  
  • Centralized notifications 
  • Project-specific customer views (coming later this quarter) 

Please read on for more information about each of these updates. 

Tanzu Intelligent Assist (initial availability) 

Intelligent Assist in VMware Tanzu Hub was announced as tech preview at VMware Explore in Las Vegas, and we are excited to announce that it will be initially available on the platform! Intelligent Assist is a generative AI tool driven by a large language model that will allow you to search cloud environments—including resources, metadata, configuration, and status—through natural language and without following a specific query format. Searching with Intelligent Assist will draw data from all of the integrated services that you use. Simply ask Intelligent Assist what you are looking for and continue to refine the results to see your resources with additional context. From there, Intelligent Assist will help you easily navigate the platform’s UI to see more context or take action. For example, you can ask Intelligent Assist to display a list of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances of a certain type in a certain region, and the results will be returned to you with easy links to navigate to them and learn more in seconds. And, if you don’t know how to do something in the platform, you can always ask Intelligent Assist, “how?” 

Screenshot of Intelligent Assist in VMware Tanzu Hub

New and intuitive platform navigation  

Tanzu Hub now features brand-new and easy-to-use navigation in the platform, which reflects the vast array of capabilities across the Tanzu portfolio of solutions helping you manage applications across a multi-cloud landscape. As new features and solutions integrate into the platform, the new navigation will enable customers to easily take advantage of all that the platform offers. The new navigation includes the following sections on the left side of the Tanzu Hub UI: 

Home – The main dashboard of Tanzu Hub 

Explore – Houses the features that help you gain visibility into your environment  

  • Search – Write queries to find cloud resources or explore inventory to better understand relationships, statuses, and configurations 

  • Application topology – View your applications and their associated resources 

  • Application modeler – Review and save potential applications that the platform identifies  

  • Kubernetes – View your connected clusters and their associations 

Intelligent services – Access the Tanzu Intelligence Services integrated with VMware Tanzu Hub, including the following services: 

  • Tanzu Insights – Including AI/ML-based trends and actionable insights 

  • Tanzu Guardrails – Cloud governance and policy enforcement 

Tanzu Application Platform – Access all the capabilities of the expanded Tanzu Application Platform (including Application Engine, more will be available as additional integrations are announced) 

Administration  

  • Set up and configure cloud accounts, projects, integrations, subscriptions, and more 

  • Automate and extend with access to APIs and other tools to deploy and manage applications 

Screenshot of Tanzu Hub

Centralized notifications

Also announced at VMware Explore Las Vegas, centralized notifications are now available in Tanzu Hub. Centralized notifications can make it easier for you to track what is happening in your environment from a single location in the platform and, critically, it includes all the integrated services in Tanzu Hub. With more and more integrations coming, you can further benefit from a central service for notifications. Centralized notifications also allow you to automate external tasks, such as sending a message to a specific stakeholder or group, triggered by specific events from Tanzu Hub. Notifications currently supported include Slack messages and emails, with support for webhooks coming soon. 

Project-specific customer views (coming soon) 

Project-specific views are coming this quarter in VMware Tanzu Hub, which will provide curated views of applications and resources specific to certain users and job types. Administrators can scope what their users can see to ensure that the information they need is available to them. For example, administrators can create a project for their cloud financial management team that shows them the resources and data they need to keep track of and the Tanzu Intelligence Services products they will need to do so. Overall, this can provide users of the platform with a more personalized experience and help draw clear lines of ownership or access. 

Try VMware Tanzu Hub today!  

The best way to learn more about VMware Tanzu Hub is to try it for yourself! We are pleased to offer a free tier of Tanzu Hub, allowing you to connect up to two public cloud accounts and experience the platform using your own data. Get started exploring in just minutes. 

About the Author

Dan Naparstek

Dan is Senior Product Marketing Manager for VMware Tanzu CloudHealth & Tanzu Hub. He focuses on overall messaging and enablement, VMware Explore events, dad jokes, and driving the launches of new features. Prior to joining Broadcom, Dan held roles in sports marketing, brand consulting, market research, and earned his MBA from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.

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