A 2022 Recap for VMware Tanzu Application Service and Cloud Foundry

December 14, 2022 Nick Kuhn

VMware Tanzu Application Service is a modern application platform for enterprises that want to deliver mission-critical microservices across clouds. The team at VMware Tanzu has been hard at work this year, continuing to enhance the overall developer and operator experiences on the platform. In addition to this work, the team continued to collaborate closely with the Cloud Foundry community and honor VMware’s commitment to open source ecosystems. Let’s review some of these accomplishments.

Tanzu Application Service 2.13

We released Tanzu Application Service 2.13 with a focus on continual improvement of the overall developer and operator experiences using the platform. Here are just some of the key features of the 2.13 release:

  • Flagship features for developers included dynamic application security groups that can update without the need for application restarts and app autoscaler step-up scaling that enables developers to determine the scale factor of their applications and container-to-container TLS encryption for improved microservice communication and security.

  • Flagship features for operators focused on reducing the time and toil spent on managing platform certificates, an overall reduction in BOSH deployment times, and improving the overall logging architecture of the platform by dedicating a new virtual machine resource group for Log Cache.

Check out the full details of Tanzu Application Service 2.13. 

Tanzu Cloud Service Broker for Google Cloud Platform goes GA

The Tanzu Cloud Service Broker for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) graduated to generally available status. The broker enables current Tanzu Application Service operators to easily extend their platform marketplace with cloud native services from the Google Cloud Platform. The broker continues to enhance the overall developer experience on Tanzu Application Service by giving developers access to first-party GCP services without needing service tickets or infrastructure requests.

Learn more about the Tanzu Cloud Service Broker for GCP. 

Tanzu Application Service 3.0

Tanzu Application Service 3.0 was released with a wide range of new developer- and operator-focused features. Here is a quick snapshot of some of the many features released in 3.0:

  • Flagship developer features include sharing Cloud Foundry routes between spaces, enhancements in Apps Manager for autoscaling and user search, and fair CPU entitlement to help ensure consistent CPU performance.

  • Flagship features for operators include the introduction of log quotas to enforce good application logging patterns and reduce overall platform costs, security updates with the rollout of Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish, and numerous system optimizations.

This release continues to show our dedication to Cloud Foundry and the platform by improving the developer experience and simplifying operations.

View the full details on the VMware Tanzu Application Service 3.0 release. 

Tanzu Application Service launches a new version format and long-term support track

With the launch of Tanzu Application Service 3.0, release and support optimizations were made to improve each customer's upgrade planning and operational stability needs. 

  • Tanzu Application Service adopted a Major.Minor.Patch+Metadata version format to communicate the level of change in each release, enabling more flexibility for customer consumption of new changes and better visibility into compatibility. Tanzu Application Service 3.0 was the first release to adopt this format. 

  • The long-term support (LTS) release program was rebranded to the long-term support track (LTST). We aim to create releases for the LTST approximately once per year, getting new features out to customers much more frequently than before.

Learn more about the updates to version format and LTST releases.

VMware expands its commitment to the Cloud Foundry Foundation 

Throughout 2022, VMware continued to invest heavily in Tanzu Application Service and Cloud Foundry to ensure it is still the best place to run mission-critical applications. 

  • Catherine McGarvey, vice president of software engineering at VMware, joined the governing board of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and was later elected chair of that board. 

  • The VMware Tanzu team continued collaborating and delivering many features within the core Cloud Foundry experience.  

  • The VMware Tanzu team worked with the Cloud Foundry community to launch Project Korifi, the latest iteration of the project that will bring the developer experience of Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes. 

Read this post for more information on VMware’s commitment to Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry Day 2022

VMware Tanzu team members attended and presented at Cloud Foundry Day, a day zero, co-located event at KubeCon North America. As the first time this event had been held in person since the pandemic, Cloud Foundry Day 2022 was an excellent opportunity for the Cloud Foundry community to reconnect and, for some of us, to meet face-to-face for the first time. Some key takeaways from Cloud Foundry Day include:

  • The community continues to develop and enhance Cloud Foundry for VMs. Sessions relating to BOSH, app autoscaler, security improvements with Jammy Jellyfish stemcells, and cost optimizations with new virtual machine types demonstrated how the community is expanding and improving the platform.

  • Cloud Foundry Korifi was introduced to the broader community as the next evolution of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes integration with a live demonstration of “cf push” to the platform.  

  • The evolution of buildpacks continues with the work the community is delivering through the Paketo Buildpacks project. 

Did you miss Cloud Foundry Day 2022? Check out this blog for a detailed description of the event and the session recordings. 

Application Service Adapter 1.0 for Tanzu Application Platform

The Application Service Adapter for VMware Tanzu Application Platform, based on the open source project Cloud Foundry Korifi, has released version 1.0. The Adapter aims to bridge the developer experience gap between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes by enabling a Cloud Foundry compatibility layer on top of Kubernetes. Developers will be delighted to see that the classic Cloud Foundry “cf push” workflow is preserved with the Application Service Adapter and can be used in conjunction with Tanzu Application Platform.

To learn more about the Adapter, check out this blog.

Tanzu Operations Manager 3.0

VMware Tanzu Operations Manager is a software appliance designed to provide a much more pleasant and straightforward experience for platform operators who use BOSH, the infrastructure-as-code automation powerhouse. Tanzu Operations Manager 3.0 highlights flagship updates around the BOSH ecosystem, including improvements to virtual machine types for cost optimization, security updates by upgrading to Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish, performance improvements, and operator optimizations. 

Read this blog to get the full details on the Tanzu Operations Manager 3.0 release.  

That’s a wrap! We look forward to all the new features and functionality that will come to Tanzu Application Service and more close work with the Cloud Foundry community in 2023! 

To make sure you are always up to date with Tanzu Application Service news, check out the Tanzu Application Service Tech Zone site!

About the Author

Nick Kuhn

Nick Kuhn is a senior technical marketing architect working on Tanzu Application Service and Tanzu Application Platform. His experience with VMware products started with a traditional role as VI admin and morphed over the years into the realm of DevOps, SRE, and Platform Architecture & Engineering for a Fortune 100 company. In his free time, Nick enjoys spending time with his family, tinkering with tech, and the occasional video game session. You can find him on Twitter @tehkuhnz.

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