We are glad to announce that, VMware App Launchpad (ALP service) – our as-a-service offering – is Generally Available as of April 28, 2022.
New solutions and services are now being released at an unprecedented pace. We understand that innovation drives businesses and developers help build differentiated services and products. A study by McKinsey & Company
shows that companies with a higher developer velocity index (DVI) see 4-5x faster revenue growth than their peers and are 55x more innovative over their bottom-quartile peers. The study indicates that the most successful companies have embraced a key capability that has a significant impact on business performance: best-in-class developer tools for application delivery. ALP service helps free your developers from focusing on the cloud complexities and focus more on innovation by empowering them with solutions that boosts developer velocity, as a result, they can build their applications more quickly and realize faster revenue generation for their company.
After we announced the Initial availability in July 2021, we put in our best efforts to bring to you a comprehensive solution that addresses the expanding needs of application development.
VMware App Launchpad has been packed with some cool new features like Multi cloud endpoint support and Automated Gateway Provisioning and offering NVIDIA NGC catalogs and many more.
Multi Cloud Endpoint Support
ALP service now enables Cloud Provider partners to easily onboard new tenants (developer personas) and offer full stack services across private and multi-clouds and
expand their support across multiple cloud endpoints by leveraging the Global Catalog Management, that unifies app deployment on VMware based Clouds across:
- VMware Cloud Director (VCD)
- VMware Cloud Director Service (CDS)
- VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS)
Container Support
- In addition to deploying container apps on the native Container Service Extension (CSE) clusters, tenant users can now provision Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) multi-cloud clusters from CSE and deploy container apps on to their TKG clusters.
- ALP service equips the service providers to support their users deploy helm chart applications on any available Kubernetes (K8) cluster. This just needs the Tenant Admin to attach the required Kubernetes clusters immaterial of clusters running on any network. (Public, restricted, or isolated).
This opens up opportunities for Cloud Providers to expand their portfolio beyond Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and offer additional cloud-native developer services for multi-cloud, private, and sovereign cloud environments built on top of Tanzu Kubernetes using Tanzu Application Platform and Tanzu Data Services. Read the GA blog to know more on that here.
NVIDIA NGC AI Development Catalog Offering
Service providers can now offer a pre curated set of GPU optimized containers that support AI development through the NVIDIA NGC catalog. Service Providers can import NVIDIA NGC catalog as a Helm chart and publish it to their developer tenants, enabling them to deploy secure, high performance computing workloads onto vGPU enabled Kubernetes clusters to support compute intensive deep learning and analyses.
Automated Gateway Provisioning
ALP Service enables accelerated onboarding of customer’s SDDC through automated gateway provisioning. As this creates management groups and management gateway resources for VMware App Launchpad to access the SDDC, without any manual intervention.
Brand your App Launchpad
Customizable UI that has visual uniformity across the organization. Tenant Admins can now customize images and welcome messages on their Application Marketplace tab of the UI.
Application Management Enhancements:
There have been a multitude of enhancements that are packaged in this release that gives the users flexibility and ease of operation.
- Users can now filter applications by catalog names from up to 5 catalogs on their App marketplace.
- Users can launch new Apps directly from their My Applications tab and can open VM web console on App Launchpad tenant portal, once VM workloads are deployed onto Cloud Director instances.
- Filter workloads with advanced options like, name, type, status, IP address etc.
- Customize disk size on VM application deployment to their VMC SDDC instance
- Service providers can customize publishing the VMware App Launchpad UI plug-in on a per tenant basis and manage tenant on-premises organizations i.e., link/unlink, through the newly introduced Customer Management page.
- With auto sync activated, service providers can customize the number of versions of an application to preserve.
- Users can add applications with multiple versions at a time and can remove/ launch specific version of a multi version application.
Getting Started
ALP service is now available under “Services Available for Provisioning” on Cloud Partner Navigator. To start using it, enable the service like any other Cloud Partner Navigator service.
If you are a VCPP rental partner and you currently do not have a Cloud Partner Navigator account, follow the onboarding instructions in the VMware Commerce Portal documentation to create your Cloud Partner Navigator organization. Partners can consume the ALP service without any additional cost.
For mor information, please check out the
- Release notes
- Product documentation
- Blog – ALP SaaS Supports On-premise VMware Cloud Director
- Tanzu Data services and Tanzu App Management Blog
For more details on the product, kindly connect with us on our dedicated Slack channel and we’d be happy to respond to your queries and feedback. If you are not a member yet then please email us for access to the VMware Cloud Provider slack channel.
