We are pleased to announce that VMware Application Catalog is now generally available for our Subscription Cloud Service Providers as of September 15, 2022. This release further expands the availability of VMware Application Catalog for Cloud Service Providers by offering them the choice to consume VMware Application Catalog through a subscription-based license model.
VMware Application Catalog (formerly called Tanzu Application Catalog) is a catalog of trusted, continuously maintained, and verifiably tested open source images, custom-built to enterprise specifications and privately delivered directly to a customer’s registry of choice. The offering leverages over 10 years of experience from the Bitnami by VMware team and will enable Cloud Service Providers to offer true enterprise-grade open source software (OSS) application components for their customers in a way that is fully curatable and customizable to the needs of their development teams. These OSS components are tested on multiple deployment platforms and are continuously verified and automatically updated for every new vulnerability fix (including those of dependencies) through an automated internal build pipeline.
With the latest release, Cloud Service Providers can now consume VMware Application Catalog in a subscription model, in addition to the existing option of purchasing via the direct license purchase model. This means that Cloud Service Providers can now pay for active artifacts – the customizable open source application images that form the base output units of VMware Application Catalog – on a monthly basis, rather than paying for them upfront on an annual basis. All of the same capabilities of the VMware Application Catalog offering are available with this subscription license model as with the direct license purchase model.
Why is VMware Application Catalog important for Cloud Service Providers?
According to 2021’s State of Software Supply Chain report, 95 percent of enterprises use OSS, of which 94 percent admit to security concerns about using OSS in production. Cloud Service Providers that currently provide OSS to their customers through cloud marketplaces may not be able to address this pain point, as the catalog of solutions they provide are more suited to dev and test environments as opposed to production environments. With the customizable, continuously verified, production-ready OSS images offered by VMware Application Catalog, Cloud Service Providers can address the security concerns and business needs of the vast number of enterprises using OSS in production.
VMware Application Catalog offers OSS images as containers, Helm charts, and virtual machines that can be deployed anywhere – there is no requirement that the active artifacts obtained from the product must be consumed within VMware platforms. The artifacts are delivered to a private repository from where they can be consumed and deployed to any platform of customer’s choice, thus enabling the Cloud Service Providers to meet their customers where they are.
Finally, with VMware Application Catalog, Cloud Service Providers working with customers in highly regulated industries such as banking, financial services, healthcare, and government, can better serve their customers’ security and compliance needs.
What values can Cloud Service Providers deliver to their tenants using VMware Application Catalog?
VMware Application Catalog offers enterprise-grade application building blocks for customers looking to bring their entire software development, build, and lifecycle management operations into their Cloud Service Provider. At the same time, subscription-based pricing allows them to take advantage of consumption-based pricing to reduce their overall costs.
With VMware Application Catalog, Cloud Service Providers can help their customers realize the following benefits:
- Faster time to production: Developers can build applications faster and move them to production quickly using the trusted, self-service OSS images tested across multiple platforms
- Flexibility and customization: Customers can choose the base OS for their applications from the list of supported base OS, or a custom OS image, and they can also select their private registry into which they can push the validated components
- Automation: Operators can let go of all manual image packaging, testing, and maintenance activities, as they are done behind the scenes, at scale, by VMware Application Catalog’s automated pipeline
- Security & compliance: Security and operations teams can gain complete visibility into code provenance, dependencies, OSS licenses, which facilitates auditability and strong compliance with security policies
In short, VMware Application Catalog helps Cloud Service Providers deliver added value to their customers’ DevSecOps teams by enabling them to focus on innovation without worrying about the many manual tasks involved in ensuring security, compliance, and production readiness.
Learn more about VMware Application Catalog for Cloud Service Providers
Looking to learn more about VMware Application Catalog? Watch the vmLIVE session, and find out how you can deliver a secure library of production-ready open-source images to your customers.
More Resources
- VMware Application Catalog Webpage
- List of all applications in VMware Application Catalog
- vmLIVE: VMware Application Catalog Overview & Demo (Partner Connect)
- Feature Friday Episode 65 – VMware Application Catalog
- Blog: Use Enterprise-Grade Bitnami Apps in Production with VMware Application Catalog
- Blog: Feature Friday Introduction to VMware Application Catalog
- Blog: What’s new with VMware Application Catalog
- VMware Developer Ready Clouds (White papers, reference archictecture, Ebooks, etc)
VMware Cloud Service Provider Resources
- VMware Cloud Provider blogs, RSS feed
- Social Media Channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube channel.
