Earlier this year we shared our vision for VMware Tanzu Platform, the evolution of the Tanzu portfolio. Today we are excited to officially announce that Tanzu Platform is now available! 

Tanzu Platform builds on more than 10 years of cloud native application platform experience first rooted in Pivotal Cloud Foundry, then Tanzu Application Service, to provide simplicity for developers and more power to the business. Now, Tanzu Platform offers teams the same developer simplicity and app-centricity regardless of application type, business requirements or runtime needs. Application teams are now empowered with four golden commands (build, bind, deploy, and scale), including the iconic Cloud Foundry command “cf-push,” that jumpstart app development, eliminate tickets, reduce onboarding time and the need for specialized skills. Platform engineering and operations teams now have the power of the Four R’s (we’ve added replicate to our original Three R’s of repave, repair and rotate), automation to build security and resiliency into operations. Tanzu Platform delivers on the speed and simplicity that developers expect of cloud-based managed services, but with the governance and cost efficiency that enterprises need for their most critical applications.

Tanzu Platform adds the value of our commercial Spring offering, data services (including RabbitMQ, Postgres, MySQL, and Valkey), and open source content (powered by Bitnami) and leverages the depth of our application intelligence to provide new visibility and telemetry from apps to infrastructure. Now, Tanzu Platform unifies the intended platform engineering experience for our customers running Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes all in one offering. It combines capabilities previously provided by point solutions such as VMware Tanzu Application Service, VMware Tanzu Application Platform, VMware Tanzu Mission Control, VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, and more, into a unified interface, Tanzu Platform hub, all optimized for VMware Cloud Foundation, but portable across your favorite cloud providers.

A cloud native app platform for hybrid cloud

The ability to deliver new applications, with new functionality securely and reliably has been driving customer value through the power of software. Over the past year, the industry has seen an explosion in new innovation as organizations seek to leverage the power of their data, often within their own data centers, to better serve their customers whether through machine learning-based (ML) problem-solving or natural-language Generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) queries. As the pressure to innovate grows, we continue to see friction between the application teams that must put speed and functionality first and the platform engineers and operations teams that must ensure applications are up-to-date, secure and scalable without increasing technical debt. The Tanzu approach, honed over many years of working with some of the largest organizations in the world, is even more important today, and is made up of three guiding principles:

The safest developer experience must also be the fastest- 

The only way to truly mitigate the risks introduced by development teams bringing unsupportable code or services into new applications is to ensure that the easiest and fastest way to get apps built and deployed is through the services supplied by the platform engineers. This has long been our north star through the rich collection of pre-configured application accelerators and self-provisioning of third-party brokered services across the software vendor landscape. Now, we are further expanding capabilities with the inclusion of entitlement to our premier data services, and Tanzu Application Catalog which provides secure, compliant, and constantly maintained access to popular Open Source community offerings.

The platform should provision the infrastructure, not wait for it 

Tanzu and especially Tanzu Labs was an early leader in helping enterprises adopt containerized applications and cloud native patterns such as a microservices approach, that separates application dependencies from the infrastructure that organizations rely on. What we’ve learned over the past decades of working on over tens of thousands of enterprise applications is that the cloud native movement has it right: the applications should dictate the infrastructure, but this does not mean that developers should be burdened with building their own manifests or understanding downstream dependencies. Tanzu Platform automates the infrastructure provisioning based on the intent surfaced through the simple commands, build and deploy. This tops-down versus bottom-up automation approach has proven itself to be scalable and resilient without requiring teams of engineers constantly debugging automation scripting.

Continuous updates of the apps, the platform, and the infrastructure is the best protection against risks 

Continuous integration and delivery is nothing new to the cloud native software world, but Tanzu Platform extends this principle through the application lifecycle by extending the four golden commands of build, bind, deploy, and scale through to day 2 operations with Four R’s: 

• First, auto-Replicating the environment based on the needs of the application across availability targets.

• Then being able to Repave every server and application in the environment regularly and with no downtime; re-creating the infrastructure over time from all known-good elements, thus reducing potential attack surface and avoiding configuration drift. 

• Next, is the ability to actively Repair running applications by surfacing and updating code dependencies based on common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

• Finally, Tanzu Platform automatically Rotates credentials and microservice certificates to reduce leaked API tokens, encryption keys, and passwords that often break through bottom-up configuration automation. 

The result is a stronger security posture and fewer business disruptions while operations teams and platform engineers have more time to focus on developer experience and reducing technical debt instead of manually patching vulnerabilities or chasing root-cause analysis for outages and leaks.

Tanzu Platform supercharges your preferred application runtimes

The tenets of Tanzu Platform are based on the outcomes our customers have achieved for over a decade with Tanzu Application Service (and Pivotal Cloud Foundry before it): elegant abstractions that offer developers velocity and simplicity, eye-popping operational efficiencies such as an average ratio of 200 developers to 1 operator, and the built-in security required in highly regulated industries. Now, Tanzu Platform aims to deliver these same outcomes regardless of application runtime or underlying infrastructure, be it on Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes, on private, hybrid or public cloud. 

Building on its heritage, Tanzu Platform marks the start of an exciting new era for Cloud Foundry users. All of the capabilities and features of Tanzu Application Service are now part of a Tanzu Platform runtime called Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry. Customers that run applications on Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry will benefit from new innovations and integrations, such as: 

Unified, multi-foundation app-to-platform visibility across Cloud Foundry foundations and application deployments, available Summer 2024. View app performance and governance, such as FIPS compliance status, and quickly resolve issues with AI-powered insights and natural language search. 

Lighter, faster, future-ready enhancements to Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry will be available in Summer 2024. Benefits for platform teams include significant footprint reductions for new foundations, smaller logging infrastructure, and simplified compliance and governance with FIPS-compliant stem cells. Developers building next gen apps can leverage trained LLMs through the AI tile.

For Kubernetes users, Tanzu Platform couples the ease and simplicity of the four golden commands and four R’s to the benefits of a Kuberentes-based platform. Users can deploy to Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes, a Tanzu Platform runtime. Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes brings together tried and tested Kubernetes operations functionality such as multi-cloud cluster fleet management and policies, and introduces new, innovative enhancements, including:

Powerful abstractions and simple commands for Kubernetes powered by Tanzu application spaces. Now generally available in its first release, application spaces is a component of Tanzu Platform that brings a simplified experience for app teams deploying apps to Kubernetes. Developers now have simple, golden commands and powerful abstractions to build secure containers, bind application services and push code to production on any Kubernetes. Platform engineering teams gain the ability to stamp out repeatable, automatable, and easy-to-repave application runtime spaces that meet stakeholder requirements. 

Access to customized, continuously maintained open source components with Tanzu Application Catalog. Providing self-service for developers while seamlessly enforcing compliance, security, and customer-specific requirements.  

Whether you choose to deploy apps to Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, or both (thanks to flexible licensing), all Tanzu Platform customers are entitled to additional capabilities and enhancements: 

Data services with fleet management and high availability support for relational databases, messaging, and caching with Tanzu for MySQL, Tanzu for Postgres, Tanzu RabbitMQ, and Tanzu for Valkey.

Application-to-infrastructure visibility and AI-powered insights in Tanzu Platform hub. Tanzu Platform users will all have contextual information and fast issue resolution. Includes access to Spring app topology and the ability to plug in existing visibility and monitoring tool portfolio. 

DevSecOps tools for application teams with Tanzu Salt (SaltStack) including commercial support, built into Tanzu Platform. Tanzu Salt helps manage application compliance and vulnerability, with closed-loop automation and remediation that goes beyond scanning to actually find and fix critical issues. 

High performance and auto-compliance for Spring. Developers will experience high-performance optimizations with additional benefits such as access to app health assessments directly in Tanzu Platform and automatic enforcement of corporate policies for Spring/Java and Spring-specific observability instrumentation. Tanzu Platform includes entitlement to enterprise support and commercial Spring repositories for version continuity, faster app startups, increased scale and performance.

Tanzu Platform offers simple, more flexible licensing

Tanzu Platform’s promise of greater simplicity, efficiency, and value extends from the technology itself to its simple and flexible licensing. Tanzu will continue with a subscription model, now with a radically simplified model developed in response to customer feedback and Broadcom’s streamlined operating model. Tanzu Platform customers can purchase one SKU, for either SaaS or self-managed deployment models to gain entitlement to all of the components within Tanzu Platform:

Tanzu Platform runtimes (Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry and Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes), Tanzu Data Services, Tanzu Application Catalog, Tanzu Spring and Tanzu Salt. 

We are thrilled to offer our customers a simple and straightforward purchasing model with the flexibility to use whatever combination of Tanzu Platform runtimes and components is best for their organization. Additional Tanzu products and services you know and love will continue to be sold separately including, VMware Tanzu Greenplum, VMware Tanzu GemFire, VMware Tanzu Spring Essentials, VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, and cloud native consulting services from VMware Tanzu Labs.

To learn more about Tanzu Platform, visit tanzu.vmware.com/platform or contact us, we’d love to hear from you.