If technology applications are the building blocks of enterprises today, developers comprise the masonry team. At VMware, we seek to empower application developers, architects, platform and digital teams alike by giving them the ability to choose the right set of tools for their unique development needs and goals. We build deep, meaningful partnerships with industry peers to support our customers’ choices across their full technology stacks.
The cornerstone of this effort is VMware Marketplace, a one-stop shop that enables application builders to discover, try, and deploy validated third-party partner solutions—both independent software vendor (ISV) and open source software (OSS) solutions—on various VMware Cloud and Tanzu Kubernetes cloud native platforms, including multi-cloud environments. And we are now etching the next chapter of this journey by introducing continuous and automated validation for our ISV and ecosystem solutions.
The need for validation
While choices are empowering in most cases, too many options can impede the speed of application delivery, especially if the choices on offer are presented poorly. For example, when it comes to building, running, securing, and maintaining applications, developers are often unsure of tools’ interoperability across the stack, and can end up expending tremendous resources to ensure it.
To simplify their process, we execute robust validation and certification programs to validate the compatibility of our ecosystem solutions with VMware platforms and communicate that interoperability in the form of badges on VMware Marketplace, for easy customer identification. However, with software release frequency now higher than ever before, the risk of applications and platforms falling out of compatibility is elevated as well.
Continuous Validation as a Service (CVaaS)
VMware’s new continuous and automated validation capability enables our ISV partners to validate, in real time, the most recent versions of their applications on the latest versions of VMware platforms and vice-versa. This capability both alleviates the need for them to manually test for compatibility while highlighting any interoperability issues. And it gives us at VMware—and our partners—the ability to present customers with the latest versions of interoperable applications that can easily be found on VMware Marketplace, which they can take advantage of at any given time. Specifically, in the initial release of VMware’s Continuous Validation as a Service (CVaaS), our ISV publishing partners can do the following:
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Trigger automated platform validation of their product (Helm Chart) through a self-service interface against VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
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View test results with associated output logs
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View the history of all past test executions, as the Marketplace keeps a persistent audit trail of the execution runs for each individual version of the Helm Chart that’s uploaded
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Publish the product on VMware Marketplace once platform tests have been successfully executed
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Optionally, upload a container with application-specific tests that they want executed against Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and view the results
And we’re not done. Going forward, for VMware Marketplace, we plan to
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extend the CVaaS functionality for container images, operators, etc. and virtual machine-based ISV products
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trigger automated revalidations with notification capability when newer versions of VMware Tanzu or VMware Cloud are released on the VMware end
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surface Environment as a Service (EaaS), which will allow ISVs to optionally self-validate their products using an interactive sandbox before submitting them for platform validation
At VMware, we want to help accelerate the application builder's journey. To that end, providing our users with access to the right set of VMware tools and compatible third-party solutions via VMware Marketplace and its CVaaS to quickly configure, build, test, maintain, and securely run applications is vital. If you are an ISV and want to learn more about how to certify your solution, read our engineering team’s blog post.
For more information on VMware Marketplace:
· Browse the catalog
· Review the documentation
· Read previous blog posts
· Follow us on Twitter
Have more questions? Be sure to read the FAQ (which can also be found under the Resources section) as well as our publisher guidelines.
About the Author
More Content by Ajay Patel
