Written by Darin Zook and Rachna Srivastava
As we spend time talking with our customers and partners, one key theme always seems to surface: every organization is looking to do more with less and accelerate the value of their investments in people, processes, and technology. Here at VMware Tanzu, we aim to help organizations accelerate their application delivery. Whether on a private cloud or public cloud, we want organizations to have the resources necessary to develop, operate, and optimize their enterprise workloads, delivering value to their end customers.
Building on over a decade of Cloud Foundry experience, we announced VMware Tanzu Platform earlier this spring. With a unified experience, teams are enabled to approach their platform as a product treating internal application teams, developers and other stakeholders as the end customer. An integrated unified application platform also helps reduce development hours, eliminates manual tasks and accelerates application development and delivery. With this announcement, we provided a glimpse into key tenets that drive our mission with Tanzu Platform:
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- The developer experience must be simple for it to be safe.
- Infrastructure needs must be dynamically scaled to meet application demand.
- Apps and infrastructure must be continuously updated to mitigate risk.
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In light of the recent packaging changes in the VMware ecosystem, we would like to explain how the updates to our product lineup, pricing, and packaging are aimed at maximizing customer value and delivering significant cost savings for your organization.
The entire app ecosystem, from a single offering
Let’s face it, building compelling business applications can be difficult. Application teams evaluate business requirements for an app and need to make decisions on a development framework. In addition to a framework, they require the ability to build, test and iterate quickly with access to open-source images. Once they’re ready to push to production, even more tools are necessary. Enterprise data services will be required for the application backend, with those services easily scalable by platform teams. App middleware components for web services, authentication for identity and security, and API management will be required.
So now there’s an application built using a development framework, from an open-source image, with data services running in the background and application middleware. There are a lot of investments already, and they’re not done yet. Now that they’re in production, they’ll need container orchestration and lifecycle management. They need configuration management to eliminate the risk of configuration drift across images and operating systems. They’ll also need secrets management to ensure that credentials, certificates, and tokens are regularly rotated to protect against unwanted threats. Above all else, as an enterprise customer, they need to ensure that every component they’re consuming can be supported – at enterprise scale. This sounds like a lot to undertake, right?
Tanzu Platform is a single solution that covers every use-case listed above. What does it take to construct an enterprise cloud-native application platform? Well, Tanzu Platform provides:
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- Enterprise-supported Java framework with Tanzu Spring
- Exclusive enhanced capabilities for Spring applications
- Secure software bill of materials, vulnerability scanning, dependency checking
- Local and server-side build environments
- Hardened application services that are validated and trusted
- Hardened OSS data services for database, messaging, caching, AI server and more
- Application middleware, integrations and API management
- Platform runtime (Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes)
- Application networking
- Secrets management
- Configuration management
- Unified management, visibility and observability from App-to-Platform
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Integrating the full suite of application platform solutions offered by Tanzu Platform can unlock significant cost savings for organizations. A recent economic validation conducted by ESG*, found that customers using Tanzu Platform experienced a 48% faster time to market, as compared to previous app platform environments, with a 36% reduction in development costs when factoring cumulative costs of prior competing solutions to build a DIY app platform. This enabled a 200:1 developer to platform engineer ratio, due to efficiency gained from streamlined IT admin tasks of 70% and lower support costs. Tanzu Platform not only safeguards and enhances the value of these investments but also simplifies the experience for both application developers and platform engineering teams.
One unified platform with unparalleled consumption flexibility
Investing wisely means ensuring you’re maximizing value and securing long-term investment protection. VMware Tanzu has consistently offered our services through a subscription model, and this commitment continues with Tanzu Platform. However, we’ve now greatly enhanced flexibility in consumption. You have the freedom to select your preferred platform runtime—Cloud Foundry and/or Kubernetes—and choose between a private or public cloud deployment model. The choice of how you leverage the Tanzu Platform offering is entirely yours, offering personalized solutions to meet your needs.
If you’re currently using Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry (formerly Tanzu Application Service) and your organization is looking to leverage the extensibility offered by the Kubernetes ecosystem for a new commercial off the shelf workload or OSS service, stateful application support, or replatforming due to an acquisition, you have the flexibility to reallocate Tanzu Platform units to Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes. Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry is trusted globally by enterprises to accelerate innovation. As evidence of our proven success, our customers see an average 18x increase in releases* with Tanzu Platform, enabling faster time to market, improved application performance and reduced downtime. However, as organizational needs evolve, evolution of skillsets and environment familiarity, so too might the requirements for their application platform. Our licensing model is designed to offer unmatched flexibility. Moreover, Tanzu Platform enhances the Cloud Foundry experience for its users by introducing new features exclusive to Tanzu customers. These enhancements facilitate unified management across multiple foundations and improved visibility, observability, and vulnerability management.
As a Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes user managing workloads on Kubernetes, if you find yourself needing to shift those workloads to an on-premises setting—perhaps opting for the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid supervisor service on VMware Cloud Foundation—you now have the flexibility to reallocate where those workloads are hosted, manage different clusters, and leverage the licensing you already possess.
Data Services, included at scale
Every useful application requires data. As organizations build new modern apps, application teams need on-demand access to enterprise supported data services that are validated and trusted. The Tanzu Platform comes pre-packaged with a rich variety of data services that support varied enterprise application workloads needed for data persistence.
Tanzu Data Services is a family of data-driven solutions built to store, process and query critical data resources in real-time and at massive scale, both on-premises and multi-cloud. The solution supports a breadth of capabilities ranging from messaging, routing, relational queries and transaction processing to caching and data warehousing. Tanzu Data Services leveraged includes Postgres and MySQL for relational databases, RabbitMQ for messaging and streaming, and Valkey for caching. Tanzu Data Services are natively built into both Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry options, enabling a seamless experience for developers and platform operators. The native data service experience makes it easy for application developers seeking easy-to-use, on-demand data services for modern applications. Tanzu Data Services are secure by default, easy to set up and manage and include data protection and monitoring capabilities for enterprise needs.
Historically, data service consumption has been time consuming and mired with red tape. For example, an application team often will need to open internal tickets with IT teams to provision new database instances. Once the instance is created, credentials to securely connect to the database must be created and delivered to the application team. Once this is complete, application teams can instantiate the service connection and continue with application deployment. These manual processes often delay application development and rollout by hours or days.
Tanzu Platform makes binding apps and services possible in just a few commands. Application teams can create the necessary service using the ‘service create’ command and then securely bind their application to the service with the ‘bind’ command. Within the ‘bind’ command, connection Info and credentials are passed to the application as environment variables or secrets, and the service connection is established. This greatly simplifies access to data services and delivers value directly to the application team.
Unified Visibility from Application-to-Platform
With Tanzu Platform, customers no longer require investment in third party tools or point products for manageability and visibility, or the need to switch between various management interfaces.
Tanzu Platform connects platform components to deliver meaningful and contextual information that users otherwise have to build on top of their platform into one single self-integrated data source. With a focus on applications, Tanzu Platform provides pre-designed workflows for different personas to interface and connect information, enabling fast decision making. Built-in AI models can rapidly correlate and provide accurate diagnosis and fast response times. Developers can build applications with complete application-to-platform information pulled from logs, AI, metrics, and more.
Tanzu Platform hub exposes a layer of information that customers would otherwise have to correlate themselves. As applications are being built and deployed, customers have real time information on application visibility, health, and control.
Platform engineers, SREs, and application owners want a comprehensive view of the application stack down to the platform. By enabling visibility and control for the entire stack, including the dependencies and correlation across the layers, issues are quickly identified and traced to the source and aligned with the business requirements. The correlation of components and visibility enables platform engineers to achieve a faster MTTI (mean-time-to-innocence) and facilitates quicker identification of the impact area. Metrics, logs, and topology data is aggregated into a centralized database, allowing customers to observe the health status across all foundations in real-time, and proactively identify and resolve any issues for self-managed or cloud environments.
Compliance and Vulnerability Management with ease
Tanzu Platform manages compliance and vulnerabilities for applications such as Spring-based applications by leveraging Tanzu Salt (previously known as SaltStack Config and SecOps).
Tanzu Platform allows users to create simple, human-readable infrastructure-as-code to provision and configure systems and software anywhere in their environment across virtualized, hybrid and public clouds. The ability to configure and control operating systems with abstracted management for Linux, Windows, MacOS, and Unix allows automatic enforcement of desired state across the entire IT footprint.
Environments such as virtual, public, and private cloud VMs can easily be managed with powerful automation and orchestration, and flexible agent, agentless, and API-based management options allow data center control with vulnerability protection and event-driven updates. The solution allows auditing and understanding the entire ecosystem’s configuration state quickly and easily. Users can define compliant states with pre-built CIS and DISA STIGs content and enforce them with automation. The event-driven automation engine defines the state of a system and auto-remediates as soon as drift occurs. Customers can perform advanced patching and maintenance with event-driven orchestration and enact changes immediately across their entire fleet with fast, scalable remote execution, along with application scanning and identification.
Tanzu Platform also enables identification of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), while built-in polyglot support extends multiple languages and environments such as Spring, .NET and others. SBOM validation ensures compliance standards are being maintained at runtime. Application Advisor within the Tanzu Platform hub helps easily patch vulnerabilities.
Increase Application Velocity with Tanzu Platform
The simplification of our portfolio into one platform, integrated services, including data in a single solution, extension of simple developer experience from Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes, and enhanced visibility and security management is a culmination of our business transformation efforts to drive innovation, simplicity and flexibility for our customers, as they undertake their journey to application acceleration.
Heading to VMware Explore in Las Vegas? Stop by the VMware by Broadcom booth (#822) to learn more about Tanzu Platform and don’t miss the end-to-end demo in the “Accelerate Your App Delivery with VMware Tanzu Platform [TANB1129LV]” session. Hear directly from our VP & GM, Purnima Padmanabhan and directly from customers on how Tanzu Platform is accelerating application delivery and lowering development costs.
*Source: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/analyst-reports/economic-validation-vmware-tanzu-application-platform
