Provisioning your applications in less than 10 minutes might seem like a fantasy, but this is a reality our customers experience consistently using Tanzu Platform. Tanzu Platform is designed to help platform engineers build and deliver cloud-native application platforms to development teams by providing powerful abstractions, standardized automation and simple commands for application teams, platform engineers and IT operations.
Nowhere was this more clear than at this year’s Cloud Foundry Day North America where the Cloud Foundry Weekly podcast crew sat down to chat with customers about how they use Cloud Foundry in their enterprise.
The live recording of the Cloud Foundry Weekly podcast was jam-packed with real-world stories of how Cloud Foundry supports customers’ application modernization initiatives. We’ve outlined a few highlights from the session below! You can also listen and watch the entire recording here.
From left to right: Nick Kuhn, Technical Marketing Manager; Nicky Pike, Solutions Engineer; Amelia Downs, Software Engineer; Tom Brisco, Executive Director, JPMorgan & Chase Co.; Greg Otto, Executive Director, Comcast
Cloud Foundry Scales Business Operations
To thrive in today’s digital business environment, enterprises are having to evolve quickly by embracing agile methodologies across their business operations, including application delivery, and security, at scale.
Cloud Foundry’s 12-year evolution has continued to deliver business and security outcomes at scale. At Cloud Foundry Day 2024, users from highly regulated industries like JPMorgan & Chase Co. and Comcast shared their experience scaling their apps on their platforms for media events like NFL Sunday Ticket and Amazon Prime’s Black Friday. During these high-traffic events, their app platforms had no downtime and scaled to keep many applications running on top of Cloud Foundry.
“Cloud Foundry is extensively used across nearly every customer experience lifecycle moment in all of our products. There are memorable moments, such as big events like the NFL Sunday Ticket. For the first game of the season and the first commercial, we see a 10x spike on the platform, and it always goes off without a hitch. We’ve had other big moments, like Peacock with the wild card game, which was a significant event in the US. Overall, we’ve had a lot of great events, and from a customer experience standpoint, they have been uneventful.” – Greg Otto, Comcast
“We run a tremendous number of applications on top of Cloud Foundry. The ones that really impress me might surprise some people. It’s not just Black Friday sales but also the Amazon Prime events. When these events kick off, there’s an incredible surge in load across everything we care about, including credit card points processing, all handled by Cloud Foundry.” – Tom Brisco, JPMorgan & Chase Co.
Developer Experience Remains Important
There’s nothing more iconic than the ‘cf-push’ command found exclusively in Cloud Foundry. Developers love the ease of the experience, as shown in this famous Haiku about the CLI:
“Here is my source code
Run it on the cloud for me
I do not care how”
A recent whitepaper published by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that customers using Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry delivered their apps 48% faster compared to a custom-built platform while lowering overall development costs by 36%.
Source: Analyzing the Economics Benefits of Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry, 2024
While developers find it much easier to run the ‘cf-push’ command to ship their code, this also impacts the efficiency of platform engineering teams, by reducing the number of platform engineers dedicated to overseeing developers. Customers that use Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry average 200 developers to 1 platform engineer, making these teams more productive and able to focus on writing and shipping code to production.
At Cloud Foundry Day 2024, Tom and Greg shared their insights into the developer experience when running their applications on Cloud Foundry.
“We hear from our clients and the app development community about the ease of the experience. You wouldn’t believe how many times in my career I hear the ‘cf-push’ experience comparison. I never knew it was a thing until I started talking about it outside. The expectation of the services and how those are done has shifted. We’ve moved away from the old school approach of dealing with IT, filling out forms, and making requests. All of the service providers internally have come together and started mimicking that. It’s really become a pole star for us to design towards creating good experiences like that.” – Tom Brisco, JPMorgan & Chase Co.
“Our first ‘cf-push’ experience was with the development team. We were baking the developer experience into the product, just like Cloud Foundry has been doing for a long time. We chose one of the most customer-critical applications to start with. We didn’t start with something easy; we started with something that, if it broke, the whole customer experience and revenue engine would be disrupted. As we went through that change, both people transformation and technology transformation, it paved the way for modernizing other applications.” – Greg Otto, Comcast
Data Services: Integral to Cloud Foundry
As development and platform engineering teams have evolved together to make their modern app platform more efficient, ease of provisioning has become a standard. Tanzu Data Services are natively built into Tanzu Platform and are an easy-to-use, on-demand data service for modern applications. Customers in highly regulated industries are required to be more cautious in how their data is stored to keep sensitive information secure and private.
With the plethora of data services available today, it can be difficult to know which option is correct for your organization. Different data services also serve different use cases and the ability to deploy apps across multiple regions. This is going to be even more important as the number of intelligent/AI-based apps that require access to data and LLMs increases.
“Tons of data services are available. Any business, maybe banks in particular, can be particular about their data, data reservation, and everything related to it. Over time, the ecosystem that developed around the platform has leveraged things like the open service broker protocols to support data platforms both within and outside our platform.” – Tom Brisco, JPMorgan & Chase Co.
Learn more about how financial institutions can maintain a safe and reliable infrastructure using Tanzu RabbitMQ in this Tanzu webinar.
It’s about a single platform experience
In our recent State of Cloud Native Application Platforms report, respondents said they wanted a one-platform experience with the ability to support multiple application types and deployment patterns as the number of platforms increased along with complexity.
Source: State of the Cloud Native Application Platform Report, 2024
Our panel discusses how they are running multiple foundations while operating them together. This one platform experience is at the heart of our most recent Tanzu Platform announcement earlier this year.
“Greg and I run a number of foundations. Internally, the way we talk about our platform is that we don’t run a cloud, we run clouds. Our internal metrics, SLAs, and SLOs are benchmarked against all of them operating together. Coordinating activity between different foundations becomes a big challenge. We abstract ourselves away from that so clients aren’t faced with pushing to different locations and then trying to figure out where everything is deployed.
When clients are accommodating growth and capacity needs—what we refer to as organic growth—they might need more instances or need to scale. Both Greg and I focus on how to let our developers step away from these concerns and focus on running the service well.” – Tom Brisco, JPMorgan & Chase Co.
“We live in a multi-foundation world. One of the big asks is how to raise the focus for developers to concentrate on the app itself. Apps come with data, so it’s crucial for the platform to handle the hard work of geo-distributing the applications and managing the data. – Greg Otto, Comcast
Since its launch 12 years ago, Cloud Foundry continues to be the best place to deliver your enterprise applications, all while maintaining security and scalability for your platform. Join us at VMware Explore Las Vegas this year to learn what exciting announcements we have planned for our customers! Register today and add these Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry sessions to your agenda.
