How VMware Tanzu Data Services Powers Development Teams Building Modern Applications

This post was co-authored by Jared Ruckle.

Every organization is somewhere along a journey to the cloud. But truly realizing the benefits of the cloud requires a fresh look at your data architecture. Modern apps leverage capabilities like decoupled services, independent scaling of data reads and writes, and event-driven architectures. Shared, monolithic data systems aren’t suited for these needs.

Meanwhile, developers want the speed and productivity benefits of a platform that offers self-servicing, automated provisioning of data resources. Waiting for fulfillment via archaic ticketing systems just gets in the way of release velocity. So it makes sense  that a cloud native app, one that’s resilient and also easy to change, would require a modern way to process data.

Three kinds of data management software are especially useful for modernizing applications: relational databases, caches, and message brokers. To that end, we introduce VMware Tanzu Data Services, a collection of products designed to ease your data modernization journey.

Tanzu Data Services, now generally available, is a portfolio of three products:

• VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ, an enterprise-grade message broker for connecting components in a distributed system

• VMware Tanzu GemFire, an in-memory data grid for applications needing millisecond access to data with strong consistency

• VMware Tanzu SQL, a SQL database-as-a-service for prototyping, testing, or production OLTP and OLAP workloads; choose either MySQL or Postgres engines

Each service supports a turnkey experience via self-service, high availability, TLS encryption, autoscaling, and integration with the larger VMware Tanzu portfolio.

Tanzu Data Services: curate open source innovation for your enterprise

Every seasoned practitioner knows MySQL and Postgres, the go-to relational databases. RabbitMQ is one of the most popular open source message brokers. And Apache Geode, an in-memory data grid, has a remarkable track record of crunching data lightning fast at scale.

Plucking these open source projects from a trusted repo and experimenting with them in a dev/test scenario is a terrific way to get started with this tech. Running them at scale in production, though? That is a different situation entirely.

You don’t want to smash these projects together with your larger environment, then be on the hook for gluing everything together and supporting it indefinitely. After all, you’re here to build and deliver great apps that differentiate your business.

Tanzu Data Services liberates you from the drudgery; each product brings open source innovation together with Day 1 and Day 2 capabilities. 

Here’s a closer look at each service.

VMware Tanzu GemFire

Tanzu GemFire, based on open source Apache Geode, is an in-memory data store commonly used for application caching. Does your website suffer from extreme latency? GemFire shines when you need fast page loads and instant data lookups. Case in point: Mastercard’s decision management platform, which is based on GemFire’s open source variant, Apache Geode.

Apache Geode/Tanzu GemFire Scalability

GemFire is terrific at exposing heritage data systems to web-scale applications by offloading requests from slower, disk-based operational databases. It’s also well-suited for streaming data capture in IoT scenarios, and for event-based push notifications at massive scale, which China Railways uses for its online ticketing system. 

That’s because GemFire reads and writes data at memory speed while also preserving consistency. Such replication across data centers and geographies promotes resilience for mission-critical applications. Even better, as your data size requirements increase, GemFire can scale linearly with ease.  

VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ

Messaging is the glue that binds distributed systems together. Tanzu RabbitMQ provides engineering teams with a reliable asynchronous fabric for passing events, commands, data, and responses among producing and consuming applications. One application can produce a notification event—a new account creation, for example. A downstream application with an event listener can consume the event to provision a resource on behalf of the new account. The eventing model of Tanzu RabbitMQ means that developers don't have to hardcode integrations between systems. A message can serve one purpose today, and as new listeners are created, another purpose tomorrow. This flexibility to repurpose messages extends the business value of the messaging system.  

Bloomberg uses open source RabbitMQ to scale financial applications in order to serve billions of requests for financial data each day.

Messaging as a Service with RabbitMQ

Goldman Sachs provides RabbitMQ to its application teams as part of an in-house messaging platform. RabbitMQ backs modern applications that serve customers across the company from trading to risk to banking—each of whom have a wide variety of use cases, payloads, and requirements. Some of these messages can be worth millions of dollars.

RabbitMQ for integrating heterogeneous applications

VMware Tanzu SQL 

Tanzu SQL provides a relational database-as-a-service for developers, one that is fully compatible with MySQL and Postgres (currently in beta). Developers get self-service access to a database designed to fit today’s automated developer workflows. Operators can enjoy the automation and sophisticated integration of the service into VMware Tanzu.

Dick’s Sporting Goods uses MySQL to coordinate aspects of disaster recovery between data centers.

Tanzu SQL (MySQL) for disaster recovery (click image for video)