Companies are under immense pressure to get “good” at software development in order to quickly adapt to changing business needs and provide a better experience for their customers. At the core of being “good” at software is developer experience. You want developers to spend more time delivering business value and shipping software quickly to respond to market dynamics and customer demands, not toiling with environment configuration, tool chain integration, and infrastructure setup that hurt productivity. In fact, a McKinsey study found that companies with a higher developer velocity index grew revenue four to five times faster than those with a lower developer velocity index; they also had a higher operating margin and were 55 percent more innovative.
However, today’s cloud native ecosystem is expansive and diverse in choices but riddled with complexity, which can hinder developer productivity. Rather than focusing on writing code and creating compelling user experiences, developers are spending a significant part of their day figuring out how to build and run new applications and how to integrate them with existing applications and back-end services, while also taking on more responsibility for delivering code securely to production.
Since its inception in late 2019, VMware Tanzu has helped customers build and deliver better, more secure software so they can meet changing market dynamics and customer demand. With customers in every major industry, including the U.S. Army Software Factory, Cerner, Humana, and Voya Financial, VMware Tanzu has become the trusted partner for organizations of all sizes and stages in their journey looking to progress along their entire app modernization journeys. With VMware Tanzu, developers are able to move faster and access the right resources for building the best applications that can deliver transformative business results. VMware Tanzu is a complete Kubernetes-native solution for building and operating modern applications at scale on any cloud.
As part of our mission to deliver a more secure software supply chain that reduces friction along the path to production, we are excited to announce the general availability of VMware Tanzu Application Platform. Tanzu Application Platform is an application-aware platform that allows organizations of all sizes to make software development a core competency, unlocking developer potential to deliver outstanding digital outcomes for the business.
Realize economies of scale with a superior developer experience
Tanzu Application Platform simplifies the work of developers and operators, increasing agility and accelerating software delivery on Kubernetes in a multi-cloud environment. Kubernetes is a game-changing technology, as one of the fastest-growing open source projects in history. It’s become synonymous as the new infrastructure as a service (IaaS). An important sign of Kubernetes momentum is the continuing shift to production, which, according to our commissioned survey, grew from 59 percent in 2020 to 65 percent in 2021.
Nonetheless, along with the embrace of Kubernetes, many enterprises are experiencing the challenges of navigating the sprawling and complex cloud native ecosystem and the steep learning curve that comes with it. Developers are often left to explore and choose from this overwhelming landscape of seemingly incoherent tools that are tough to set up and maintain and that work inconsistently across teams. And connecting them to other apps and infrastructure is extremely complex. Even after accumulating a set of disparate tools, developers find themselves wasting a lot of time editing a series of YAMLs instead of developing innovative code. Operations teams, on the other hand, need to manage too many bespoke software supply chains and face trouble integrating existing DevOps and security practices, while managing multiple cloud environments running multiple apps.
Delivering a superior developer experience on any Kubernetes
Tanzu Application Platform is a modular, application-aware platform that provides a rich set of developer tooling and a prepaved path to production to build and deploy software more quickly and more securely on any public cloud or an on-premises certified Kubernetes cluster.
With Tanzu Application Platform, you can deliver revenue-generating applications to market faster because your developers can spend more time building great software instead of toiling and stitching components together. Tanzu Application Platform enables you to make more secure products because operators can configure the supply chain with baked-in security and compliance guardrails, making those considerations mostly invisible for developers, thereby helping you avoid downtime that could damage your brand.
Designed to enhance developer productivity and user experience with a Kubernetes abstraction layer for faster, self-service, more secure, development and delivery of apps with Tanzu Application Platform, you can:
Make your developers happy
Enable developers to quickly get started with preconfigured templates for VMware Tanzu for cloud native patterns, saving them time in bootstrapping a new application. Get a consistent GUI to bring services and APIs together in one management portal, making them easy to discover and integrate with other apps. Get instant access to developer tooling for rapid iteration and debugging of code straight from their IDE. All these leading capabilities let developers get a fast path to start, build, deploy, and iterate on code changes.
Bring your own opinions
Relieve developers of the error-prone process of editing a “wall of YAMLs” and automate the application deployment process via a secure software supply chain workflow. Tanzu Application Platform includes an end-to-end supply chain, with its components pre-instrumented to work together seamlessly out of the box. Operators can use Supply Chain Choreographer for VMware Tanzu to create pre-approved paths to production and can also customize them to bring their own opinions to meet business needs. This feature allows customers to define certain security practices in these paths, such as inserting capabilities for signing, scanning, and storing along the path to production. All of this reduces friction for developers as the supply chain automatically takes the app from source code to URL seamlessly while enabling customers to implement stronger security practices. As we saw with the Log4Shell incident, widespread vulnerabilities can appear suddenly, requiring organization-wide mitigations over a very short period of time. Within Tanzu Application Platform, VMware Tanzu Build Service uses Cloud Native Buildpacks to automatically create and update containers from validated building blocks. Tanzu Build Service users could easily mitigate the vulnerability by adding an environment variable to their run image and rebasing all existing applications built on it.
Accelerate your path to production
Establish a clear separation of concern between DevSecOps for seamless handoff of application from development to production. Tanzu Application Platform makes that handoff frictionless because it only requires the developer to commit their code (e.g., "git push"). As developers commit code, the secure software supply chain is triggered automatically, providing a continuous path to production. With the extensibility and tools to match your environment, Tanzu Application Platform can help you get your code to production quickly and continuously.
To learn more, contact your VMware account team, or reach us at tanzu.vmware.com/application-platform.
This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.
