This is blog two of a four-part series exploring why Tanzu Hub is a game changer for platform teams. Be sure to check out our first blog, “Your Unified Interface for Application Delivery with Tanzu Hub.”
Imagine the intricate web of applications powering a modern enterprise. It’s rare to find them confined to a single environment, foundation, or even a single cloud. Instead, critical workloads are often distributed across various business units, data centers, regions, and even continents. Organizations look to their platform engineering teams to deliver application platforms that are built for speed and scale; however, building a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is challenging. While it may start with a single application, or by solving for a specific problem, that one application environment quickly begins to proliferate. For Cloud Foundry customers, this reality translates into a landscape of multiple foundations, each independently managing vital applications and services.
This complexity creates real challenges:
- Duplicated effort – This decentralized approach inevitably leads to duplicated effort. Historically, we have focused on building significant value and capabilities into each individual foundation. This often results in either larger, harder-to-maintain monolithic foundations or the expenditure of valuable cycles and resources on building new foundations, which could be better allocated to innovation.
- Limited visibility – Compounding this is the pervasive issue of limited visibility. Without a single, unified view, platform teams struggle to gain a holistic understanding of application health, resource utilization, and potential issues across their entire Cloud Foundry footprint.
- Increased operational overhead – What might begin as a straightforward PaaS deployment for a single application quickly morphs into a daunting undertaking as business-critical workloads demand scale across diverse data centers, regions, and even geographies.
- Governance and compliance – As different teams and business units inevitably manage their own environments, each with their distinct patterns and tooling, operational inconsistencies are unavoidable. This fragmentation directly impacts governance and compliance, creating gaps where policies might be inconsistently applied, leading to configuration drift, and significantly slowing down incident response times due to the lack of standardization.
The absence of centralized management forces platform teams into a reactive, manual mode. They find themselves endlessly stitching together disparate dashboards, wrestling with a multitude of credentials and identity providers, and constantly context-switching between various UIs and tools. This not only introduces significant operational friction and slows down critical platform operations, but, more critically, it creates a formidable bottleneck that hinders the rapid delivery of new applications and services, directly impacting the organization’s ability to innovate.
Fleet-wide management with Tanzu Hub
The good news for Cloud Foundry customers using Tanzu Platform is that Tanzu Hub addresses these challenges head-on with true fleet-wide management. It provides a single unified interface across your entire fleet of Cloud Foundry foundations, thereby giving platform teams the ability to monitor, govern, and optimize foundations at scale.
Here are just a few ways that Tanzu Hub helps accomplish this:
- With a unified UI that surfaces telemetry, configurations, and runtime insights across every connected foundation. It provides a single source of truth for platform operations without having to navigate to each foundation. IT teams can view performance metrics, resource management, and security alerts across all foundations, providing a holistic view of their environment.
- With centralized visibility, centralized control is enabled. Now platform engineering teams can be enabled to track compliance across environments, consistently enforce policy, and further automate access controls.
- With built-in and customizable runbooks, teams can move from alert to action quickly and confidently. Tanzu Hub aggregates service metrics and platform health into the same workspace, providing greater troubleshooting and contextual awareness. IT teams can resolve issues in minutes using step-by-step runbooks and knowledgebase articles, and they can take advantage of out-of-the-box and custom alerts that provide in-context notifications with live data.
Multi-foundation views bring enhanced visibility right from the Tanzu Hub home screen. At a glance, platform teams can view alerts and capacity for all connected foundations. They can see the total number of running app instances and services, memory consumption, and more, all accessible from a single view. Health, utilization metrics, and capacity information enable fast application triage and more efficient capacity planning. You get at-a-glance views of Diego capacity by foundation, helping you quickly assess and manage resources, preventing bottlenecks and ensuring smooth operations. Analytics for metrics such as anomaly detection and percentile calculations further help analyze data better.
The Tanzu Hub home screen shows at-a-glance views of critical alerts for foundations, Diego memory capacity, status of app instances, and underutilized applications.
To bring additional logical grouping and organization to foundations, platform engineers can group foundations by regions, business unit, network segment, environment tier, or criticality. Using tags or foundation groups (or both!), platform engineering teams can view utilization and health, make workload placement decisions based on capacity, and more, based on how they operate—whether globally, by function, or by risk domain. Our next blog will dive deeper into these capabilities specifically.
Tanzu Hub’s multi-foundation view provides the ability to filter by user-defined tags or foundation groups to aid in workload placement and capacity management.
Scale your application platform without scaling complexity
Consider the use case of a global organization. Platform engineering is responsible for delivering a scalable application platform that supports business-critical applications to application teams worldwide. Foundations could be geographically dispersed across US, EMEA, and APAC regions, each with its own regulatory and sovereignty requirements.
While this would traditionally be a complex architecture to implement and maintain, Tanzu Hub enables them to unify the operations of those foundations at scale. They can logically group foundations by region and environment tier and tag foundations with the types of workloads running within them, allowing for centralized management and capacity planning. They can ensure that teams have access only to foundations within their region or business function, utilizing role-based access control.
Tanzu Hub enables you to reach at-scale management of your foundations, while minimizing complexity. It helps drive consistency across your fleet, allowing you to apply standards and policies, and monitor and protect against drift. Manage hundreds or thousands of workloads across foundations, while retaining visibility and governance no matter how distributed your application platform becomes.
How to get started
If you’re a Tanzu Platform customer, Tanzu Hub is available now in Tanzu Platform 10.2 and is easy to explore, installed right from OpsMan. Not yet a Tanzu Platform customer? Request a demo.
VMware Explore will be held at The Venetian in Las Vegas from August 25 to August 28, 2025. You can see the Tanzu Platform in action at the VMware booth or during any of our breakout sessions throughout the week. This event is also a great opportunity to ask questions of experts, network with peers, and deepen your knowledge of VMware solutions.
Stay tuned for blog no. 3, where we’ll dive into how Tanzu Hub enables more efficient capacity management, making workload placement decisions, and managing resource utilization easier at scale.
