To fuel business growth, organizations are looking for ways to accelerate their application development and delivery process while adding AI-based features that help drive revenue and operational efficiency. In today’s landscape, this often involves building new or rewriting existing applications using popular programming languages and frameworks.
As workload needs evolve, IT teams should not have to manage separate platforms for legacy and modern applications. A unified operating model is essential for reducing costs and streamlining processes. Luckily, it’s not necessary to completely rewrite your existing .NET applications or take on costly migrations to modernize or add AI models.
As we’ll explore, VMware Tanzu Platform consolidates application delivery onto a single, consistent platform, requiring minimal changes to applications. This approach allows customers to lower operational overhead, enhance developer productivity, and modernize at their own pace, all without disrupting critical business systems.
The Platform pressure cooker
According to Gartner®, Adoption of Top Programming Languages and Frameworks research, 44% of organizations reported currently widespread use of C#/ASP.NET/VB. While these applications remain essential to business operations, many are tied to outdated infrastructure, inflexible deployment models, and high operational overhead. Teams face the challenge of managing aging Windows environments, dealing with custom Windows services, and even supporting legacy technologies like Silverlight. Routine maintenance can be risky, as applications often go offline during patching cycles, which can potentially jeopardize business operations and revenue.
Meanwhile, platform and operations teams are under pressure to modernize their systems, contain costs, and support new development models and frameworks—all without forcing developers to rewrite every legacy .NET application from scratch. Replatforming legacy applications can ease this burden for developers while providing platform engineering teams with opportunities to unify operations through a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model. These solutions enable speed and agility for new applications while ensuring robust governance, security, and compliance controls.
The Cloud Conundrum for .NET Workloads
Many organizations feel compelled to migrate their applications to the public cloud for many reasons, including guaranteed long-term support for older Windows versions or to maintain Windows authentication. However, public cloud is not always an ideal environment for these workloads, which have traditionally operated in data centers for decades. Many .NET applications have specific bandwidth or latency requirements, are closely linked to large SQL databases, and may have data sovereignty needs due to regulatory or strategic business considerations. Organizations also face overspending on cloudscale capabilities that a .NET app may never need, such as horizontal scaling, active/active multi-site, or multi-regional presence. This is a challenging position to be in for many organizations.
The Tanzu Platform unified approach
The VMware Tanzu Platform offers a purpose-built solution for modernizing your .NET apps with a trusted, enterprise platform that supports both legacy and modern .NET applications securely and at scale. It brings together the Hosted Web Core (HWC) Buildpack for Windows-based .NET Framework apps and Buildpacks for .NET Core and .NET 5+ applications. This enables organizations to support a full range of .NET workloads without fragmenting their platform strategy.
For legacy .NET Framework applications that rely on IIS or tightly coupled Windows configurations, the HWC Buildpack offers a way forward without requiring extensive code changes. Apps can run as isolated processes on Windows stemcells, free from direct IIS dependencies, while benefiting from Tanzu Platform’s automation, health monitoring, and scaling features. This removes the need for manual patching and intervention, dramatically reducing downtime and operational burden.
For more modern .NET workloads, including .NET Core and .NET 5+, the .NET Core Buildpack provides a streamlined way to build and run applications on Linux. These buildpacks are cloud-native and fully integrated with Tanzu Platform and Tanzu Build Service, offering a consistent experience across development and production environments. Developers can take advantage of modern workflows and automation without having to adopt new tools or re-architect existing apps.
This unified approach solves another challenge: many organizations manage .NET apps separately from Java or Node.js apps, leading to silos in CI/CD, monitoring, and governance. Using the Tanzu Platform, all workloads can be deployed using the same platform, policies, and pipelines, which improves team efficiency and simplifies compliance.
Address common concerns with confidence
App dependencies, like scheduled jobs or custom Windows services often pose a challenge. But Tanzu Platform supports job execution patterns that replicate these legacy behaviors in modern ways. Similarly, concerns about running in disconnected or classified environments are addressed through Tanzu Platform’s full support for air-gapped deployments, which includes all the automation and platform features without requiring cloud connectivity.
From a business standpoint, the value of Tanzu Platform is clear. It reduces the total cost of ownership by consolidating workloads, automates lifecycle management, and supports compliance through curated buildpacks and hardened base images. More importantly, it allows organizations to modernize at their own pace, migrating .NET apps when ready, rather than under duress.
For organizations navigating the complexity of .NET modernization, Tanzu Platform offers a path forward that doesn’t compromise stability or speed. Whether running legacy apps on Windows, modern services on Linux, or preparing for the next generation of AI-driven development, Tanzu provides the foundation to move forward with confidence.
Discover more about Tanzu Platform at VMware Explore! Save $200 on your full conference pass by registering before June 16th. For additional information on Tanzu Platform, visit www.vmware.com/products/app-platform/tanzu or contact your sales team to set up a discussion.
