At SpringOne Essentials this year, VMware introduced new learning opportunities for enterprise developers, as well as technical advancements in some of its flagship platforms. We’ve also released the results of the annual State of Spring report, now in its third year. These announcements reinforce VMware’s transformation from a pure infrastructure provider to a cloud native application platform provider helping organizations build, run, secure and iterate on their apps on any cloud.
If you’re reading this you probably know that the past decade has brought profound changes to the IT industry and that it’s always evolving and learning. Whether we are doing business, treating disease, connecting with each other, or protecting our citizens, software helps us adapt to meet changes beyond our control. Think about how quickly we changed the ways we interact with each other, how we shop, how we access healthcare, and how we travel in response to Covid-19? We saw how the companies that had already adopted cloud native practices and technologies prior to the pandemic were able to adapt quickly, and even thrive.
To be sure, with all the care taken to deliver great experiences to end users comes complexity in the systems that deliver and run them. Consider the amount of data required to personalize a patient’s experience while ensuring you’re not running afoul of privacy laws, to keep citizens informed while adhering to government regulations, or to protect customer data while fighting attempted security breaches? Now consider the end-user expectation that these experiences are delivered instantaneously and through multiple channels (mobile, web, in person, etc.).
Regardless of expectation and complexity, we need to get stuff done today. This means navigating that complexity and recognizing that the software industry will continue to evolve and innovate. We have to get things done, and we have to continue learning.
With that in mind, I’ve highlighted some recent advancements from VMware that will help you strike a balance between delivering software today while supporting the innovation that will help your business grow tomorrow.
Platform matters
VMware’s Tanzu Application Platform helps customers build, secure, iterate, and run applications on any cloud. Along with VMware Tanzu Application Service, Tanzu Application Platform enables you to innovate on your own terms by giving developers access to the tools, APIs, services, and open source technologies they love, while giving platform engineering and security teams the ability to enforce policies and governance in a way that doesn't disrupt developers’ flow.
Tanzu Application Platform has been on a quarterly release cycle, delivering dozens of new features and capabilities. The latest release, Tanzu Application Platform 1.4, has several enhancements and features designed to help developers get their code to production more quickly regardless of where it’s running. We’ve improved interoperability with Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDE, added new API lifecycle management capabilities, enhanced buildpacks, and added capabilities to make troubleshooting easier and more effective.
On the platform engineering side, Tanzu Application Platform 1.4 includes capabilities for platform engineers that help them build and curate golden paths to be consumed by various development teams. Introduced by Spotify in 2020, the idea of golden paths is a manifestation of multiple disciplines including DevSecOps, software supply chains, API-first operations, and shift-left thinking.
Meanwhile, Tanzu Application Service, the flagship application platform for building and running microservices across clouds, continues to add capabilities for devs and platform engineers. With the release of Tanzu Application Service 3.0, VMware has added features that allow developers to focus on their code and for teams with platform concerns to further streamline Day 2 operations and beyond.
Based on the open source project Cloud Foundry Korifi, VMware released the Application Service Adapter for VMware Tanzu Application Platform, a Cloud Foundry compatibility layer on top of Kubernetes that helps customers ease into the Kubernetes ecosystem while preserving the developer experience they’ve already built.
You can read about the amazing year Tanzu Application Service had here.
With the introduction of Aria Operations for Applications (formerly known as Tanzu Observability), VMware now offers a comprehensive, extensible, and intelligent monitoring and observability platform for dev and platform teams alike. Aria Operations for Applications is a unified observability platform that brings together metrics, traces, and log management enabling more actionable insights and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) at a massive scale. Read more about it here.
Devs do data too
For more than a decade, RabbitMQ has been one of the most popular and widely deployed open source message brokers. Since the launch of VMware RabbitMQ, VMware has been offering all the messaging and streaming capabilities of RabbitMQ in a supported, enterprise-grade distribution. With the introduction of VMware RabbitMQ for Kubernetes, VMware is allowing customers to self-host and self-manage RabbitMQ deployments.
The evolution of VMware RabbitMQ continues with the beta release of managed VMware RabbitMQ as a service. Building on empowering developers with capabilities so that they can focus on what they are good at, i.e., application development, instead of worrying about the deployment and low-level operational concerns of running RabbitMQ. With VMware RabbitMQ as a service, developers can easily access and use RabbitMQ for messaging and streaming all while increasing the resilience of their modern applications without having to worry about the infrastructure, deployment, and scaling of RabbitMQ. Read more about the RabbitMQ as a service beta offering and how to sign up for the beta program.
Part hyperbole, part truth, the notion that data is the new oil is not too far off. Consumers, patients, employees—essentially, humans—no longer expect bad digital experiences, whether that’s on their phones, computers, cars, or wearable devices. Delivering experiences that attract, retain, and delight your end users depends on the experience of the developers who are creating them, and how you use data to create them.
Keeping with the data theme, we’re announcing the upcoming beta release of VMware GemFire 10. This major new version brings significant new features and enhancements that enable developers to build high-performance, scalable applications more easily. Some of the features include:
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New management interface with GemFire console – A single console that can provide insight across an entire fleet of GemFire deployments
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Full-text search – The ability for developers to build full-text search capabilities into their applications
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GemFire for Redis Apps – Expanded compatibility and new eviction policies with simpler deployment as an extension module
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Spring for GemFire – Enhanced compatibility and long-term support for Spring applications
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Better documentation – Documentation improvements that allow GemFire to store documents flexibly as BSON or native Portable Document eXchange
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Java 17 support – GemFire has been extensively tested under Java 17. ZGC is selected by default, which provides excellent low pause behaviors that mesh well with in-memory workloads, particularly on large heap sizes.
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Jakarta EE 9 – Session state replication modules will support Apache Tomcat 10 and the Jakarta EE 9 namespace.
GemFire applications can be developed in Java, C#, C++, Node.js, or REST. GemFire 10 will be available across public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. It will also seamlessly integrate into Kubernetes and Tanzu Application Service platforms for simplicity of deployment and Day 2 operations. Read more about the GemFire 10 beta.
Always be learning
Just as technology is constantly evolving, so should tech professionals. Whether you’re an application developer, platform engineer, or cloud architect, there is always something to learn. VMware launched KubeAcademy, and since then it’s delivered more than 100,000 hours of training at several levels. Today we also announced the launch of Spring Academy. Modeled after KubeAcademy and created and curated by the Spring team, Spring Academy provides on-demand learning opportunities for enterprise developers at all levels. With a free tier or a paid subscription, Spring Academy can help developers at all levels of their career.
In 2020, VMware launched the State of Spring survey designed to gain an understanding of how and why enterprise developers use Spring Framework and Spring Boot. Not surprisingly, the top use of Spring is to expose APIs and in support of modern architectures like microservices and serverless. In fact, this year we saw an increase in the use of Spring for serverless architectures. Software engineers and app dev managers alike can download VMware's State of Spring 2022 report to learn what their peers are doing and how they are succeeding with Spring.
Be sure to check out my colleague Josh Long's summary of the technical-focused sessions from the event. To connect with more like-minded developers and customers, consider attending SpringOne, which will be held in Las Vegas as part of VMware Explore. We’re also launching The Golden Path to SpringOne. Join a rotating lineup of speakers as they present on a wide array of important topics covering everything from Spring, programming tools, platforms, and tech stacks to the people, processes, culture changes, and real-world stories that will empower today’s developers to do more. These will be live streamed on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2 PM ET, starting January 31 on Tanzu.TV and YouTube.
