The journey to enhance the VMware Tanzu portfolio into a unified platform has been shaped by decades of valuable customer feedback. Our most recent evolution aims to simplify the tasks of Platform Engineering and Development teams, streamlining the process of building and deploying applications.
This year at VMware Explore, we're delighted to unveil Tanzu Platform 10, set to redefine enterprise application delivery and management. Crafted for the modern enterprise, this latest version provides enhanced flexibility and observability for managing, securing, and optimizing applications. Tanzu Platform empowers organizations by allowing them to choose between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes or both for their platform runtime, either in public or private clouds, ensuring a tailored solution to meet individual needs.
For those leveraging Kubernetes environments, Tanzu Platform continues to support favorite functionalities like multi-cloud cluster fleet management, comprehensive security policies, and role-based access. We've improved the user experience for Kubernetes as we have for Cloud Foundry, enabling effortless collaboration and delivering value more effectively. This enhanced experience includes unified platform operations, application visibility, managed data services, and the recent introduction of simplified commands – build, bind, deploy, and scale – along with an application-centric approach to Kubernetes called Application Spaces.
A new way for development and operations teams to collaborate
Kubernetes has been praised for its ability to orchestrate complex applications, but it has a steep learning curve and operational overhead. Both the developer and the operator experience have not gotten any simpler, and understanding and optimizing Kubernetes is no simple task.
Tanzu Platform empowers organizations to achieve greater levels of developer productivity and engineering efficiency by using cloud-native standards and providing an extensible and interoperable stack that benefits from state-of-the-art innovations such as application spaces, which builds an application-centric platform and moves away from treating Kubernetes as the “starting point.”
Application spaces created in Tanzu Platform abstract the complexity of infrastructure from developers and introduce application-aware landing zones we call 'spaces’. In those spaces, platform engineers can configure environments (e.g., high availability, connectivity, security) based on the application requirements. Application spaces redefines agility and productivity for both developers and platform engineers, who can collaborate asynchronously. Spaces are motivated by the need for a contract between different personas in a high-velocity software organization. Diverse teams each contribute to an application space through a low-friction, high-fidelity API tailored to their individual domains of expertise.
Spaces act as the focal point where contributions from platform engineers, developers, NetSecOps, SREs, etc., are combined to ensure applications run efficiently and securely. A team member (e.g. a platform engineer) can configure a space for an application with all of the infrastructure configurations, policies, services, and other capabilities they see available for use. Once the space is created, developers can continuously maintain code in the space from their IDE using a simple CLI command.
It makes everyone's lives easier when developers can focus on writing code and platform engineers can use extensible, open standards and ensure environments are secure by default through automatic injection of service mesh functionality, including mTLS for service-to-service traffic and zero-trust, policy-driven egress/ingress controls.
The Developer Perspective
Imagine developers interacting with self-service catalogs and APIs that platform engineers and other IT roles have already vetted for best practices, compliance, and security (e.g., DNS record, egress connectivity, load balancing, etc). Gone are the days when bringing an application to production required dozens of ad-hoc coordination meetings or “ticket ops” to request a simple resource.
Let’s imagine I’m a developer prototyping a new web application for my company. I’m using the popular Spring Boot framework, developing on my workstation locally to start, and using the "tanzu build" command to generate a manifest and a software bill of materials.
The "tanzu build" command takes the source code and builds the application into deployable artifacts, such as container images with all their dependencies and the conventions needed so it can run on the platform, including runtime optimizations. No need for the developers to know how to create these manifests and containers. It will all be pre-configured by the platform team, ensuring repeatability and best practices for security.
Now my application is working on my workstation. The hard part is over! Next, I want to deploy it somewhere so others in my company can try it. Here’s where application spaces in Tanzu Platform makes it easy. I don’t need a PhD in Kubernetes to deploy my app. All I need to do is work with my platform team to create a space tailored to the needs of my application runtime; if I'm a seasoned developer, I can also create a space myself. And if we’re deploying a Spring app, we can use the Spring Profile that has been preconfigured for it and I'll be able to run the “tanzu deploy” command. That’s it! The application space handles the heavy lifting, translating my application’s runtime requirements into actual infrastructure.
The "tanzu deploy" command is a simplified final step to ensure that an application is running in a custom-built space that includes all needed capabilities for a particular app, for example, multiple clusters for availability, secure by default, with routing and DNS configured automatically.
In the end, I get a URL to access my newly running app.
The Operational Advantage
The past several years have witnessed the tremendous rise and adoption of cloud native patterns. Kubernetes has been an integral technology in helping organizations recognize business value from their IT systems. Respondents to this year’s State of Cloud Native Application Platforms (former State of Kubernetes) further highlight the value of cloud native computing, with 93% claiming it has transformed the way they do business.
Platform engineers, line of business leaders, and app dev managers all recognize the importance of delivering a developer experience that accelerates the delivery of revenue-generating applications. Tanzi Platform 10 empowers platform engineers to define best practices, maintain compliance, and manage operational concerns in service of faster, more secure app delivery which ultimately leads to business value.
The application spaces abstraction supports these value-building activities! Spaces are a highly composable, object-oriented API built on Kubernetes primitives like controllers, CRDs, and self-healing schedulers.
Spaces allow a platform engineer to curate capabilities, define the security model with network policy and mTLS controls, and configure data services to support stateful applications. Once a space is created and an app is deployed to it, the "tanzu bind" command binds apps to middleware and databases and automatically manages credentials and connection strings.
The "tanzu bind" command simplifies configuration of applications and their dependencies. Like the bind command, app development teams can also use the "tanzu unbind" command to unbind service(s) when needed or this can be done directly in the Tanzu Platform UI. The bind/unbind commands not only configure application dependencies but also maintain state and reconfigure everything when an app reboots or restarts on a different cluster. As a result, app teams do not have to write any Kubernetes YAML or master Kubernetes complexity. Simple CLI commands will take their code from source to deployed to bound to services with routing enabled. Watch this video to see some of the commands in action.
More time-saving and operational efficiencies come with the configuration of high availability (HA) and global server load balancing (GSLB). Spaces can be configured with multiple availability targets so when an app is deployed it runs on multiple Kubernetes clusters, enabling availability. As a next step, the platform needs to be connected to your GLSB of choice so that it can route incoming traffic to applications across clusters within a space. The space with GSLB automates the Ingress, Egress endpoints for apps and dynamically updates DNS records. Application traffic can have encryption by default, and mTLS enabled. A space can also automatically manage certificates needed for encrypted traffic.
Platform teams can curate a catalog of services for teams to consume, such as Valkey, Neo4j, RabbitMQ, Postgres, Mongo, MySQL, etc. These services can be provisioned on-demand for quick and easy iterations and testing in development environments or pre-provisioned in production environments. Platform engineers will find Tanzu Platform APIs flexible enough to customize while also ready to use on day one with valuable defaults. In short, platform engineers are the heroes of the modern software development factory when they build platforms with Tanzu.
Why Tanzu Platform for your Kubernetes workloads
We are introducing several features for customers with Kubernetes environments.
Capabilities, generally available today in Tanzu Platform, include multi-cloud cluster fleet management, policies, role-based access, and application spaces as described above. For existing customers using both developer services and Kubernetes operations capabilities formerly delivered by Tanzu Application Platform and Tanzu Mission Control, the unified Tanzu Platform will bring together those products.
With many customers building their private clouds with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), we are also working towards better integrating Tanzu Platform into VCF to bring the best experience our customers could have when leveraging a modern application platform. This includes an easy installation experience that preconfigures Tanzu Platform on VCF for a ready-to-consume developer platform, and brings the latest features, including application spaces, to our customers.
With Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes, customers can leverage:
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- Simple operations to Build, Bind, Deploy, and Scale applications
- Day 2 operations for applications, including start/stop/restart
- A core set of Tanzu-provided profiles to guide teams to easily create their first application space
- A curated set of packages and configurations tailored for the Spring development framework
- App-centric fleet management and curated packages for deploying polyglot applications
- Highly available and secure spaces as deployment options for applications (with data services) and automatically configured GSLB and mTLS capabilities
- The ability to deploy customer-built or COTS software, either via Helm or pre-built images (from external CI/CD pipelines), to a space
- Cluster lifecycle management and policies that provide familiarity and continuity for existing customers
We are actively working with customers and partners to capture and address feedback so we can continue to innovate and provide global organizations an industry-leading cloud native application platform for business-critical workloads leveraging Kubernetes.
We are excited to meet in-person with our VMware community during VMware Explore Las Vegas 2024 and present several Kubernetes and Platform Engineering-related sessions.
To learn more about Tanzu Platform, visit tanzu.vmware.com/platform or contact us. We’d love to hear from you.
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 created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.
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