The VMware Application Catalog team is continuously looking for ways to improve the experience for our developers and operators, as well as how to better support them in their application modernization initiatives.
VMware Application Catalog is a selection of trusted, pre-packaged, continuously maintained, and verifiably tested open source solutions (OSS) that are privately delivered to a customer’s registry of choice. With the production-ready OSS images offered by VMware Application Catalog, developers can take their apps to production much faster, while security and operations teams can ensure strict compliance with security policies by leveraging a detailed bill of materials for every image that proves the trustworthiness of the requested software.
Aligned with these tenets, we have now launched extended support for the operating systems (OS) that we offer in VMware Application Catalog as base image options. We have been working on this upgrade for the past several months and have added new versions of all of the base OSs we currently support: CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, and PhotonOS.
What’s new with OS support in VMware Application Catalog?
Some key points to note regarding the extended base OS support are listed below.
- From now on, VMware Application Catalog will support all major or stable OS versions as supported by the distribution. For instance, VMware Application Catalog now supports both Debian versions 10 and 11, as these are the versions currently supported by Debian.
- A new OS version will be added to our list of supported base OS images once it exists as a stable version. Whenever a new OS version is added, we will expand the verification process of VMware Application Catalog on time to ensure that the entire catalog is verified on the new OS version as well.
- Removal of the oldest version of each OS will occur when the distribution version reaches its end of life. For example, in the case of Debian versions 10 and 11, VMware Application Catalog will continue to support them for at least as long as Debian supports them.
How do you benefit from this?
With these extensions to the base OS support in VMware Application Catalog, the migration of applications between different stable versions of the same base OS now becomes much easier. Developers can try new artifacts with a new branch while still supporting the older ones in production environments. Moreover, operators can now seamlessly compare the performance, security, compatibility, and stability between two different versions of an OS.
VMware Application Catalog keeps updating the current catalog of applications for all supported OS on a continuous basis. This provides our users with a clean and continuously maintained set of OSS applications so that they can focus on innovation while building new applications and not worry about security and compliance.
Next steps
To learn more about VMware Application Catalog, you can read about our most recent updates, visit the product webpage and technical documentation, or, reach out to our product team directly with more questions at app-catalog@vmware.com.
