This is blog three of a four-part series exploring why Tanzu Hub is a game -changer for platform teams. Part one explains how it acts as a seamless interface and control panel for Tanzu Platform. Part two shows how Cloud Foundry customers can use it for true fleet-wide management.
Managing platform capacity in modern, distributed application environments isn’t just about scaling up, it’s also about scaling smart. For platform teams running Tanzu Platform, the ability to see, plan, and act on capacity insights in real- time is critical to maintaining performance, avoiding overprovisioning, and keeping costs in check.
In the third blog of our Tanzu Hub series, we’re diving into how Tanzu Hub helps platform engineers make data-driven decisions about workload placement and capacity planning, so they can operate more efficiently and respond faster to changing demands.
The importance of capacity management
Managing resources and capacity is a continuous challenge in modern application environments. As these environments become more distributed, the impact of poor capacity management becomes increasingly apparent. Overutilization leads to degraded performance, missed SLAs, and constant firefighting, while underutilization results in increased costs and wasted resources.
A perpetual challenge for application and platform teams lies in workload placement, where the decision of where to deploy workloads—whether individually or at scale—can be as critical as how they are executed. Teams must meticulously consider application performance requirements, resource availability (e.g., CPU, memory, networking), regional availability, compliance mandates, and team ownership boundaries. This intricate balancing act frequently devolves into a reliance on disparate tools, compounded by manual spreadsheet matrices and informal tribal knowledge for placement decisions. Such an opaque and guesswork-driven approach inevitably cultivates inefficiencies and risks, ultimately leading to overloaded environments, underutilized resources, debilitating performance bottlenecks, and inflated operational costs.
To remain competitive and stay ahead, platform teams need real-time visibility and insightful analytics, and we have built Tanzu Hub to deliver both.
Managing capacity with Tanzu Hub
Immediately after connecting Tanzu Platform foundations into Tanzu Hub, you’ll begin to see utilization, metric, and performance data collected and reported right in the dashboard. At-a-glance capacity views display real-time Diego cell capacity by foundation alongside app-level consumption data. Platform engineers can instantly see how much compute is in use, how much is left, and where pressure is building, removing guesswork and eliminating the need to poll individual foundations.
Figure 1: The capacity widget in the Tanzu Hub dashboard reveals capacity utilization and potential problems.
Using built-in capacity analytics and alerting, Tanzu Hub can flag overutilized or underutilized environments before they become a problem. This gives platform teams the ability to take proactive measures, such as scaling infrastructure, shifting workloads, or cleaning up idle applications.
Figure 2: Analize trends in capacity over time for memory, disk, CPU and containers.
Tanzu Hub also enables platform teams to logically group applications and foundations. This helps them manage platform capacity, understand how resources are consumed, and see which services applications depend on (more on this in our next blog!):
- Foundation groups are a collection of one or more Cloud Foundry foundations grouped together based on logical, operational, or organizational boundaries. This could be used to manage foundations in different regions or data centers, or to group foundations by environment tier (dev, test, prod, etc.) or another logical grouping. (Example: you You could have a Foundation foundation Group group called “US-East Production” that includes all production foundations in your East Coast data centers.).
- A business application within Tanzu Hub is a grouping of multiple component apps and microservices that work together to achieve a specific business outcome.
Optimizing workload placement using Tanzu Hub
Now that we understand some of the capacity management features, we can use these to empower data-driven workload placement decisions.
By combining real-time health, utilization, and capacity metrics with topology views, platform engineers can:
- Place new workloads on foundations with available headroom
- Rebalance applications across regions for optimal resilience and performance
- Proactively plan to increase or decrease capacity allocated to foundations
- Optimize opportunities for an app’s use of platform resources
- Align placement with business priorities
As an example, imagine you’ve just received word that one of your application teams is getting ready to push a new application into production, and you want to ensure that it’s being pushed to a foundation with sufficient available headroom to support the application. Using Tanzu Hub, you can get a side-by-side view of each foundation’s total capacity and current utilization, as well as health status. Platform teams can now use this data-driven approach to optimize workload placement and ensure that they’re maximizing their investments.
Benefits for platform teams
As you would expect, Tanzu Hub’s capacity management benefits for platform teams are numerous:
- Efficiency – Identify and reclaim underused resources instead of overspending
- Resiliency – Keep workloads performing reliably by avoiding overloaded environments
- Cost savings – Minimize overprovisioning and reduce reliance on third-party capacity tools
- Governance – Align workload placement with policy or regulatory requirements (i.e., region-specific data laws or isolation boundaries)
Figure 3: Using the foundations view, platform teams can quickly identify optimal foundations for deploying services
Tanzu Platform is built to not only solve today’s challenges but also to enable scalable, policy-aware operations that grow with your application platform. By reallocating idle capacity and improving workload distribution, organizations can avoid unnecessary hardware purchases while delivering faster performance to their internal teams.
What’s next?
In our fourth and final blog, we’ll discuss how organizations can lower their mean time to resolution (MTTR) and increase visibility and understanding of application, platform, and infrastructure operations with Tanzu Platform and Tanzu Hub.
Are you headed to VMware Explore in Las Vegas? Be sure to check out our Tanzu Platform breakout sessions or stop by the VMware booth to learn more about Tanzu Platform and see Tanzu Hub in action.
Learn more about Tanzu Platform by visiting our website, or reach out to your VMware Tanzu account team to see a demo of Tanzu Platform!
You can view the entire Tanzu Hub blog series below:
Part 1: Your Unified Interface for Application Delivery with Tanzu Hub
Part 2: At-Scale Management and Multi-Foundation Views with Tanzu Hub
Part 3: Smarter Workload Placement and Capacity Management with Tanzu Hub
Part 4: Observability and Visibility at Scale with Tanzu Hub
