VMware Tanzu Application Service 5.0 Improves Application Operations and Platform Engineering

This blog was written by Mia Villarreal and Nick Kuhn. 

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of VMware Tanzu Application Service 5.0! Tanzu Application Service 5.0 delivers features that continue to enhance the developer experience and can improve platform engineering.

As announced at VMware Explore Las Vegas this year, with Tanzu Application Service 5.0, we have released a host of new features designed to improve the overall experience for both developers and platform engineers.

Improved application operations for developers

To continue improving the overall developer experience of the platform, the following features have been added to assist with application monitoring and troubleshooting: 

• Application readiness health checks – Application “readiness” health checks have been added for application instances in the 5.0 release. Readiness health checks are a great way for developers to recover faster from transient application errors and for platform engineers to reduce CPU and memory churn in a Tanzu Application Service environment. Developers can make use of the readiness health check in their applications to better mitigate temporary failures, such as a cold cache hit or a temporary loss of database connectivity. When its readiness health check fails, the application instance is temporarily unregistered from the Gorouters to allow time for the error to resolve without destroying and re-creating the instance. 

• Distributed tracing enables faster debugging – Adding tracing to all Tanzu Application Service components enables faster debugging and troubleshooting for developers. Customers can trace errors and pinpoint network issues using VMware Aria Operations for Logs and other log aggregation tools. This means that customers can also have a quicker way to tie information together from multiple Tanzu Application Service components and that support engineers can identify the root cause of issues and debug them more quickly.

• OpenTelemetry metric exporter support (beta) – OpenTelemetry metric exporter support has been added as a beta feature. With this feature, customers will be able to optimize how they ship metrics on an application and platform level, resulting in fewer virtual machines (VMs) deployed and the potential for more cost savings. This feature can enable platform engineers to egress metrics directly via the OpenTelemetry Collector as an alternative to using the firehose and/or nozzles. Combined with aggregate syslog drains, Tanzu Application Service customers can use this feature to complete the shared-nothing architecture for logs and metrics.

Continued investment in expanding the Developer Portal

The Tanzu Application Service team continues to expand the functionality of the Developer Portal beta. 

• Tanzu Application Service Developer Portal supports data persistence (beta) – Developers and platform engineers alike can benefit from MySQL database integration for persisting data in the software catalog and other plug-ins used in the Tanzu Application Service Developer Portal. Our engineering team has made great strides in contributing MySQL support to the Backstage community.

Reduce engineering toil with enhancements in Tanzu Operations Manager

VMware Tanzu Operations Manager is the foundation for any Tanzu Application Service deployment, and the following features have been added to improve the platform engineering experience:

• Automatic rotation of BOSH DNS certificates – BOSH DNS certificates automatically rotate on stemcell upgrades through an opt-in feature in version 5.0. Platform engineers can track the rotation process and keep a pulse on each phase of the rotation. This enables an “always be rotating” model that could help eliminate the need to allocate time and apply changes multiple times specifically for rotating certificates.

• Improved disaster recovery workflows – In the rare event that you experience catastrophic failures within your cloud provider, the team has added additional BOSH workflows to repair a Tanzu Application Service deployment in a more streamlined fashion. Specifically, two BOSH commands (“bosh create-recovery plan” and “bosh recover”) have been added to expedite platform engineers with their disaster recovery workflows.  

• Tanzu Operations Manager database pruning – Platform engineers with large environments can now remove data no longer needed by creating a database pruning schedule within Tanzu Operations Manager. This can be achieved with an “om cli” command to set the desired retention policy (number of days) for objects within the Tanzu Operations Manager database.

• Human-readable virtual machine names for VMware vSphere – Platform engineers can configure Tanzu Operations Manager to deploy virtual machines with human-readable names that allow for easy identification and troubleshooting within vSphere. Machines will be deployed with the format instance-group-name_deployment-name_id instead of the traditional name scheme of vm_guid(vm_d6f0f537-18cd-4a1b-b0f5-ae03e8f590e8).

Human-readable virtual machine names deployed in vSphere are depicted above.

Exciting expansions within the Tanzu Application Service ecosystem

• VMware Tanzu Cloud Service Broker for AWS MSSQL support – The Tanzu Cloud Service Broker for Amazon Web Services (AWS) has moved support for Microsoft SQL (MSSQL) to generally available status. This enables developers to deploy production-ready instances of AWS MSSQL via the Tanzu Application Service marketplace. 

• Simplified multi-site deployments – The release of VMware SQL with MySQL for Tanzu Application Service 3.1 has introduced simplified multi-site MySQL deployment capability. This means developers can consume the service plan for multi-site deployments more easily, without worrying about additional network complexity. Platform engineers can configure multi-site deployment across two Tanzu Application Service foundations without needing their networks to be routable between each other, paving the way for multi-site support across Tanzu Application Service foundations hosted on different clouds.

• Expanded cloud provider support with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution – Tanzu Application Service 5.0 has added support for installing the platform on top of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Platform engineers can expand their platform deployments and use additional solutions in the Oracle Cloud ecosystem without rebuilding their application platform. 

• VMware Postgres for VMware Tanzu Application Service – Platform engineers can now extend their existing Tanzu Application Service marketplaces with VMware Postgres. This will enable developers to easily consume Postgres databases with their application running on Tanzu Application Service. Get the full details of the 1.0 release of VMware Postgres for Tanzu Application Service.

Explore new horizons with AI and Tanzu Application Service

VMware is excited to announce the Tanzu Application Service AI beta program, planned to launch later this fiscal quarter. Customers interested in running private AI services within their Tanzu Application Service environment can sign up for this beta program to get early access to what we are building within the Tanzu Application Service ecosystem utilizing private AI technologies.

We continue to build new functionalities into the Tanzu Application Service platform, and we’re excited to share the latest capability to run your application workloads with private AI. Some of these capabilities could include:

• A generative AI-style application running inside a Tanzu Application Service/Cloud Foundry ecosystem

• The ability to run large language models (LLMs) inside your Tanzu Application Service foundations and package them to be deployed as Tanzu Application Service tiles

• Use of the `cf push` interface to build and run private AI-based applications

Along with joining the beta program, we are interested in working closely with design partners to create strong relationships and potentially expand further than a development project. Connect with a team member to learn more.

Download Tanzu Application Service 5.0 on Tanzu Network today! Be sure to register for Tanzu Application Service sessions at VMware Explore Barcelona. And stay current with the latest Tanzu Application Service content at Tech Zone.

VMware makes no guarantee that 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. This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.

This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.