As part of strategic digital transformation initiatives, a growing number of organizations are turning to container technologies to accelerate application development and testing, as well as to drive server consolidation efforts and to assist with multi-cloud compatibility challenges. In a recent blog post, Dell reported on a commissioned survey that found that, on average, over 50% of applications are containerized.
Container-centric approaches to application modernization offer numerous benefits, such as application portability, speed, workflow-driven operational consistency, scalability, and security. However, respondents to the survey cited the complexity of enabling technologies, as well as uncertainty about security capabilities, lack of internal know-how, and fear of high costs as challenges that prevent broad container adoption. For organizations managing disparate infrastructures while also onboarding new technologies, the barriers to container adoption can be high.
A full-stack hybrid cloud platform
VMware Cloud Foundation™ with Tanzu™ provides a full-stack hybrid cloud platform that delivers AI-ready infrastructure to enable customers to accelerate application modernization efforts through container adoption. VMware Cloud Foundation is based on VMware’s proven and comprehensive software-defined stack including VMware vSphere®, VMware vSAN™, VMware NSX-T Data Center™, and VMware vRealize® Suite. VMware Cloud Foundation provides a complete set of secure software-defined services for compute, storage, network security, Kubernetes management, and cloud management. In addition, VMware Cloud Foundation contains built-in automated lifecycle management to simplify the administration of the software stack, from initial deployment, to patching and upgrading. The result is agile, reliable, efficient cloud infrastructure that offers consistent operations across private and public clouds that is ready to run both traditional and modern, container-based applications.
Many of our readers are very comfortable with the concept of deploying virtual machines in a VMware environment, but you may be wondering how VMware Cloud Foundation can address the challenges of complexity, security, and ease of use when it comes to provisioning and managing a container-ready cloud. VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu Standard, Advanced, Enterprise and Subscription editions all contain VMware Tanzu Standard, offering integrated Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Tanzu Management.
Once Cloud Foundation has completed the automated deployment of a workload domain – complete with compute, storage, networking, and management infrastructure – the process of enabling Tanzu Kubernetes is quite simple, as you can see in the demos on core.vmware.com. If you are ready to deliver developer-ready infrastructure based on your Cloud Foundation infrastructure, VMware now offers the Developer Ready Infrastructure VMware Validated Solution, free of charge, that fully documents and automates not only the deployment of your Tanzu environment, but also the configuration and integration with components of your infrastructure like Active Directory, DNS, and NTP. And, with the Validated Solution, you can deploy your Developer Ready Infrastructure on top of Cloud Foundation in as little as 24 minutes.
Being able to deploy secure, full-stack developer ready infrastructure in such little time means that your developers and data scientists have more time to develop, test, and deploy modern apps – bringing faster value to your business. With the automation provided by VMware Cloud Foundation, you can reduce the barriers often associated with adopting a container-centric approach to application modernization, without needing extensive internal know-how or time.
A great example of how VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu provides UniversitätsMedizin Essen (UME) in Germany with a platform that helps the healthcare provider deliver VM and Kubernetes based services to support their massive growth. UME implemented VMware Cloud Foundation™ with Tanzu. The aim was to establish a scalable, high-performance platform to process vast quantities of data and to support the hospital in its advanced use of AI. You can read more about UME in this case study.
Learn more
If you’d like to learn more, check out the executive summary of the results of Dell’s survey as well as the infographic summarizing how Dell Technologies and VMware solutions provide a pragmatic approach for container adoption. To learn more about VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu, please refer to this Modern Apps solution brief on vmware.com.
