Kendrick Coleman and Mark Schweighardt contributed to this blog post.
Modern enterprises face the challenge of speeding up application delivery while achieving compliance across security, performance, and cost. The vast cloud ecosystem provides many tools and options, but this complexity can destabilize operations if not properly managed.
When building new business-critical apps, application teams must meet many requirements, such as data privacy laws, high availability, disaster recovery, security controls, auto-scaling for traffic spikes, cloud cost budgets, and their own functional and technical needs. Historically, addressing these through ticket-based operations has caused poor collaboration, miscommunication, and friction between teams, leading to suboptimal outcomes or organizational risk. There must be a better approach to bringing apps to production efficiently while meeting organizational governance and compliance requirements.
Introducing VMware Tanzu Application Engine
Today at VMware Explore in Las Vegas, we’re introducing a private beta of the VMware Tanzu Application Engine, a new capability planned for the VMware Tanzu Application Platform.
Tanzu Application Engine is designed to introduce an application-centric layer of abstraction to allow applications to run with consistent operational governance and compliance—within and across clouds. The abstraction model will create a clean separation of concerns between stakeholders: Developers will be able to focus on their applications without worrying about infrastructure details, platform engineers will be able to focus on managing and operating infrastructure at scale, and operators will be able to define configurations to meet organizational governance and compliance requirements.
Tanzu Application Engine aims to solve significant pain points for each of the many stakeholders involved with bringing modern applications to production—across application, platform, and operations teams.
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Application developers are enabled with self-service access to approved app environments, called VMware Tanzu Application Spaces, reducing the cognitive load associated with infrastructure details and gaining velocity to production. Tanzu Application Engine also aims to allow app developers to manage and scale their applications, even as platform engineers upgrade and maintain the underlying Kubernetes clusters and related infrastructure and resources, giving both teams room to operate and optimize the application.
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Platform engineers can benefit from standardization and end-to-end automation, enabling them to curate and manage application environments and the underlying infrastructure at scale. Tanzu Application Engine is designed to enable platform engineers to reuse, update, and manage a library of their Tanzu Application Space profiles to offer curated app environments that already meet current and emerging security, performance, and cost needs. Other goals include the ability for platform engineers to back up and restore Tanzu Application Spaces and perform Space rescheduling for non-disruptive cluster upgrades.
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Designated operators (e.g., NetSec and service operators) can define necessary configurations to achieve governance and compliance for applications running in Dev-Test-Stage-Prod and multiple cloud choices. Automation-backed self-service APIs enable organizations to shift security left without placing the entire burden on developers. For example, a security operator could define configurations and policies related to data protection for conforming to PCI DSS standards, while a service operator could curate service classes that make it easier for application developers or application operators to claim and bind to service instances, such as databases, messaging queues, and caches to improve developer productivity.
With Tanzu Application Engine, we aim to achieve this through a unique blend of the following core principles and technical innovations:
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Intense focus on the developer experience – Tanzu Application Engine is intended to become a core capability of Tanzu Application Platform, strengthening VMware’s hyperfocus on simplifying the end-to-end developer experience and allowing developers to focus entirely on writing code and creating applications.
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Balancing simplicity, flexibility, and optionality – Tanzu Application Engine strikes a balance between simplicity, flexibility, and optionality. Simplicity for developers to rapidly bring their apps to production, with out-of-the-box or custom Tanzu Application Space profiles for operators, and flexibility for platform and operations teams to curate the vast Kubernetes ecosystem and VMware value-added resources needed to fulfill complex application requirements.
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Application-focused abstractions and services – Tanzu Application Engine aims to provide unique app-focused abstractions and services that sit between applications and infrastructure, separating the concerns of app developers and various operators, and enabling applications to run with consistent capabilities and policies—across clusters and clouds.
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Minimal-friction collaboration model – Tanzu Application Engine aims to introduce a minimal-friction collaboration model that enables different stakeholder groups, such as platform engineers, NetSec, and service operators, to work in parallel and independently contribute configurations to a Tanzu Application Space, reducing process inefficiencies that come with organizational silos and manual processes and handoffs.
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Out-of-the-box capabilities and traits – Tanzu Application Platform aims to provide a rich catalog of capabilities, applications, and services that could be used with applications running in Tanzu Application Spaces, both open source and VMware-provided. This can enable platform engineers to curate from a vast ecosystem of options and more easily bake security, performance, and cost standards into the application space.
We are designing Tanzu Application Engine to reduce the friction felt by developers, platform, and operations teams. It aims to balance developer velocity with governance and compliance through app-centric abstractions and minimal-friction collaboration.
This innovative approach represents the future of cloud native platforms in enterprise public clouds and could solve the technical and social challenges of operating at scale.
Learn more about Tanzu Application Engine in these sessions at VMware Explore 2023:
MAPK2762LV – Solution Keynote: Accelerate Application Delivery for Continuous Innovation
MAPB2682LV – VMware Tanzu: Your Complete Application Kubernetes Platform
MAPB2711LV – See it Now: Integrated, End-to-End Application Delivery with VMware Tanzu
MAPB2781LV – Accelerate App Delivery and Centralized Management on Public Clouds
Learn about what else is coming to Tanzu Application Platform in version 1.6. And read about all of the announcements coming from the VMware Tanzu team at VMware Explore 2023.
Disclaimer: VMware makes no guarantee that features and services announced in preview or beta will become available at a future date. The information in this press release is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract.
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