Develop, Operate, and Optimize with VMware Tanzu: A VMware Explore Roundup

August 22, 2023 Danielle Burrow

Applications are the center of your organization’s business. Success (or failure) depends on how quickly you can respond to dynamic market demands driven by cultural shifts, technical innovation, and global events. This business agility is driven by fast, predictable application delivery

The past few years have seen IT leaders in the public sector and private industry alike rushing to get better and faster at delivering applications and services to their customers, employees, and constituents. Organizations that have already adopted cloud native operating models, including DevOps/DevSecOps platforms, and that invest in the developer experience are realizing significant business success.   

Extending the business value of app dev and delivery 

The advent of the DevOps platform came from a collection of CI/CD toolchains and disparate pockets of automation. Today we’re witnessing the emergence of a composable set of shared services, reinforced with modern app development and delivery practices that reduce friction along the path to production and that continuously secure applications, regardless of where they are running. 

Because we believe that developer agility and infrastructure agility are inextricably linked, VMware is expanding VMware Tanzu Application Platform into a product family to include both development and platform engineering capabilities. Tanzu Application Platform offers VMware Tanzu Developer Portal, VMware Tanzu Secure Supply Chains, existing capabilities from VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, and an exciting new capability, VMware Tanzu Application Engine.

Empowering continuous learning and improvement

Developing and deploying applications is just the start of the journey. Managing applications and the underlying infrastructure brings its own set of challenges—and also opportunities. Having easier access to application cost, performance, and security data in one central control plane breaks down information silos and enables a culture of continuous improvement. Teams can leverage insights and patterns across the entire app development and delivery lifecycle, making it possible to respond to issues quickly, continuously tune applications and environments, and make better-informed design choices for new applications. We are excited to introduce a new Tanzu product family designed to supercharge the Day 2 operations for platform engineering and ops: VMware Tanzu Intelligence Services.

Tanzu Intelligence Services includes portions of the VMware Aria portfolio, delivering a platform for federated data to empower platform engineering and cloud operations. Tanzu Intelligence Services  helps teams proactively optimize the cost, performance, and security of applications across clouds and includes VMware Tanzu CloudHealth (formerly VMware Aria Cost by CloudHealth), VMware Tanzu Guardrails, VMware Tanzu Insights, and VMware Tanzu Transformer (formerly announced as VMware Aria Migration). 

VMware can help you DOO IT

Together, Tanzu Application Platform and Tanzu Intelligence Services offer a complete, yet composable platform of capabilities to help you Develop, Operate, and Optimize your applications on any Kubernetes and any cloud. These three tenets inform VMware Tanzu’s mission to help customers accelerate application delivery, and they are at the core of new innovations we’re sharing highlighting this week at VMware Explore. Here’s a brief summary of the tools and services we’re announcing today.

Develop

Tanzu Application Platform helps you build new apps and modernize existing enterprise apps faster and more securely with a great developer experience. Offering modular, app-aware features, Tanzu Application Platform includes Tanzu Developer Portal, built on Backstage, and Tanzu Secure Supply Chains. We’re excited to announce new innovations to help developers focus on what matters most, writing their code! 

  • Tanzu Developer Portal extends curated app templates and more secure supply chain automation with the ability to further customize the experience with support for an ecosystem of open source and DIY Backstage plug-ins (currently in beta). Read more here.

  • Tanzu Application Platform 1.6 includes an enhanced enterprise developer experience with Spring Framework 6, Spring Boot 3, new .NET Core support, and deeper IDE integration. Read more here.

  • VMware Application Catalog, now available in AWS Marketplace, helps customers mitigate risks of open source in app development with CVE threat level assessment and package tracking. VMware Application Catalog now offers a security-focused subcatalog with VEX documentation. Read more here.

  • VMware Tanzu Application Service 5.0 includes new features that will improve the developer experience and improve platform engineering with enhanced automation and a resilient application runtime. ​Read more here.

  • New Spring Consulting services provide organizations with hands-on help directly from experts with connections to the Spring Framework. Upgrade a portfolio of apps to the latest version of Spring, architect and build new Spring apps, or migrate an existing portfolio of apps to Spring.​ Read more here.

Operate

Scale platform operations through automation, a multi-cloud app runtime, and a platform engineering discipline. VMware is applying its decades of experience working with infrastructure and operations teams to help organizations transform team culture and practices, adopt new technologies, and contribute more to their organization’s business success. From product features to our award-winning customer success and services offerings, our hands-on work with enterprise platform teams inform our solution capabilities and new innovations. 

  • Tanzu Application Engine (beta) will introduce a powerful capability enabling application teams to request business requirements such as high availability, more secure connectivity, and scalability. Platform engineering teams will be able to embed these requirements into a curated Application Space that automatically and continuously enforces them at runtime, even across different Kubernetes clusters and clouds. Read more about this exciting new capability.

  • We’re also announcing enhanced multi-cloud Kubernetes operations through new lifecycle management for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in addition to AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Read more here.

Optimize

The ability to proactively and continuously govern, tune, and secure applications in real time regardless of where they are running is critical for optimization. The capabilities in Tanzu Intelligence Services help teams manage and fine-tune the cost, performance, and security of their applications across multiple clouds with integrated AI/ML capabilities. And today we’re excited to announce new innovations and enhancements: 

  • VMware Tanzu with Intelligent Assist (tech preview) will improve operations from reactive to proactive and dramatically streamline operational workflows by providing a conversational chatbot experience powered by generative AI that leverages the federated data architecture across VMware Tanzu Hub’s integrated solutions. Read more here.

  • Tanzu CloudHealth will enable deeper cost savings through ML-powered forecasting (beta) to improve budget planning and dynamic Kubernetes rightsizing without downtime, along with cluster cost visibility for Kubernetes FinOps powered by Tanzu CloudHealth. 

  • Tanzu Insights will empower operations teams to better troubleshoot and resolve issues with holistic visibility and deeper AI/ML-powered insights across distributed Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure environments. Read more here.

  • Tanzu Guardrails improves multi-cloud governance through new policy-based automation to create landing zones on AWS and Azure and introduces automated policy enforcement. Read more here.

  • Tanzu Transformer increases success of app migration and modernization initiatives with support for migration assessment and planning to VMware Clouds and public clouds with planning workflows. APIs for third-party integrations are also being released in beta. Read more here.

All applications rely on data

As AI and ML become more and more prevalent in digital products, easy access to data services and managing data at scale will continue to be critical requirements for organizations in the enterprise. 

  • VMware Greenplum 7 is designed for scalability, and now it can handle a wide range of workloads—from light transactions to machine learning and advanced analytics—and is compatible across multiple cloud environments. Read more here. And learn about the power of using Greenplum on Samsung technology for analyzing massive volumes of data at outstanding speeds. 

Multi-cloud management

VMware Aria solutions continue to provide cloud management capabilities, especially critical in enabling organizations to transform physical compute into a true IaaS surface. Through Aria Universal Suite, cloud builders will be able to turn vSphere/VMware Cloud environments into true clouds. Read more about new innovations for VMware Aria here.

Open ecosystem for composability and choice with guardrails

VMware Tanzu is built to help you take advantage of a robust ecosystem of tools and services while allowing for composability. With VMware Tanzu, platform teams can standardize tooling and build golden paths to production for developers using out-of-the-box or third-party components. The VMware Tanzu platform integrates into existing enterprise environments, giving developers flexibility and freedom to focus on business logic rather than policies, configurations, and onboarding. And platform teams, based on functional and non-functional requirements, can then ensure consistent governance, continuous improvement of cost optimization, and continuous security.

If you’re attending VMware Explore in Las Vegas or joining the live stream, don’t miss the solution keynote, Accelerating App Delivery for Continuous Innovation on Tuesday, August 22 at 12:15PM PT.  And for those of you joining in-person, visit us at the Modern Apps and Management booth to demo solutions and talk to experts. Lastly, explore dozens of informative breakout sessions covering Tanzu and Aria solutions in the curated session catalogs below:

About the Author

Danielle Burrow

Danielle Burrow leads portfolio product marketing for VMware's Modern Apps and Management solutions. Prior to VMware, Danielle worked in product marketing at Pivotal Software and in sales and digital marketing at Google. Danielle also has a background in the non-profit and healthcare sectors. Danielle has a BA in Art History from UCLA and an MA in Counseling Psychology from Santa Clara University.

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