Our first ever VMware Explore this past August was an action-packed event full of announcements, learning, and hands-on experiences. We had powerful conversations with customers and partners about how modern enterprises are making efforts to evolve out of “cloud chaos” and into a “cloud smart” world. We learned so much at the first VMware Explore event that we’re doing it again. The digital transformation journey continues, and our next stop is in Barcelona!
If you’re attending VMware Explore Europe this year, you will quickly learn that most attendees are looking to modernize applications and optimize their IT infrastructure. Operators want to empower developers to move quickly by putting the resources they need at their fingertips without sacrificing the security of the infrastructure or losing control of costs. As part of the pivot to modern apps, organizations are turning to containers and Kubernetes to run software reliably across environments and clouds.
VMware’s recent State of Kubernetes 2022 report found that not only is there a growing trend toward multi-cloud environments, but 76 percent of organizations say they are significantly increasing their investment in containers. To avoid complex or scattered infrastructure, it’s vital that teams can create a standardized and consistent experience for IT teams regardless of where their applications are running, whether it be on public and private clouds, or at edge locations.
That’s why organizations are looking to VMware for support with adopting a multi-cloud strategy.
Here is a quick roundup of all the new VMware Tanzu portfolio features you can expect to hear about at VMware Explore Barcelona:
Harness any Kubernetes on any cloud with Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations
One of the first steps to optimizing IT infrastructure is choosing a foundation to standardize your modern, multi-cloud container infrastructure upon. Customers feel confident in their decision when choosing VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations because the platform is fully supported by VMware and frequently enhanced. This solution provides a simplified, consistent approach to container deployment, scaling, and management with tools, automation, and data-driven insights.
At VMware Explore Europe, we're excited to announce several updates to the key components that make up Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, such as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, VMware Tanzu Mission Control, and VMware Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced edition.
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1 – Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is a conformant, enterprise-ready Kubernetes runtime that streamlines operations across a multi-cloud infrastructure. At VMware Explore in San Francisco, we announced Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0, which brought the new Cluster API feature ClusterClass for enhanced cluster lifecycle management as well as Carvel tooling for application lifecycle management to the supervisor cluster. With the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1 release, we are bringing the same new features to the management cluster. To provide customers with even further flexibility and choice in deployments, we’re also announcing support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in addition to existing support for AWS, Azure, and vSphere. Read more.
- Tanzu Mission Control – VMware is also announcing a new initiative to design and offer self-managed, private deployments of Tanzu Mission Control, which provides automated, policy-driven management and security support to customers as they scale Kubernetes cluster deployments. Customers that must operate on on-premises and in air-gapped environments will benefit from full control of their entire fleet of clusters and network infrastructure connectivity. GitOps support is also being expanded from single clusters to Cluster Groups, and the Bitnami Application Catalog will be integrated to Tanzu Mission Control to bring trusted, upstream open source software packages with streamlined installation.
- Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced – Updates to Tanzu Service Mesh being previewed today would allow operators to automatically discover Kubernetes clusters, enable onboarding of those clusters for secure connectivity, and take advantage of new GitOps support to further unify operations with Kubernetes clusters. Read more.
The new VMware Tanzu enhancements make Kubernetes optimized for edge environments, provide consistent Kubernetes management to on-prem, air-gapped environments, and bring Kubernetes operations to more public clouds.
Reimagine multi-cloud management with VMware Aria Hub, Aria Graph
As IT teams accelerate app development and leverage a multi-cloud environment, platform teams must increasingly rely on cost, performance, security, and configuration data—often sitting in disparate tools—to understand the complete characteristics of the application that they are building. New enhancements to VMware’s Tanzu portfolio are complemented by new and expanded VMware Aria capabilities for cloud native application and multi-cloud management.
Unveiled at VMware Explore US in San Francisco, VMware Aria Graph is a graph-based data store technology that provides a near real-time map of applications and clouds with management insights from customers’ existing VMware Aria solutions as well as federated third-party management tools. VMware Aria Graph is available within VMware Aria Hub, a new platform that provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment. Together, the VMware Aria portfolio, including VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph, deliver app-aware management to native public clouds and hybrid clouds that can empower customers to address challenges that span discipline, tools, and teams.
Today at VMware Explore Europe, VMware is announcing the availability of a new freemium offering of VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph. This new free tier offering enables customers to inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two of their native public cloud accounts in either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. The freemium offering allows users to understand the relationships of their resources to other resources, policies, and other key components in their cloud environments. Additional free functionality includes visibility into CIS benchmark violation data coming from VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds as well as list price costing for resources coming from VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth. With the free tier, customers can manually curate applications to better understand dependencies and relationships of their business applications. VMware is also announcing the Beta availability of VMware Aria Migration. Previously announced as Tech Preview at VMware Explore in San Francisco, VMware Aria Migration is a new end to end service that can leverage VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph to accelerate and simplify the multi-cloud migration journey by automating assessment, planning, and execution.
Enable operators to deliver trusted, secure, and compliant apps with VMware Image Builder
Open source is at the core of enterprise innovation with rapid adoption across enterprises in development, but use in production has slowed due to concerns on addressing security and lifecycle management, as reported in VMware’s State of Secure Supply Chain Survey 2022. To address the growing needs around managing the content that enters into the corporate software supply chain, VMware is announcing the beta launch of VMware Image Builder, the Bitnami engine powering the automation behind the packaging, verification and distribution of VMware Application Catalog artifacts.
VMware Image Builder is an API-first SaaS solution that enables automation of the creation of secure, trusted, and continuously maintained software artifacts in alignment with corporate compliance standards to publish to developers as building blocks in the development process. VMware Image Builder enables packaging artifacts into multiple formats (containers, Helm, Carvel, OVA), followed by the ability to trigger a range of verification tests including compliance check, functional, performance tests and vulnerability scans on a variety of Kubernetes distributions and VMware vSphere across all major cloud platforms. Read more.
VMware expands “Kubernetes Everywhere” initiative to sovereign cloud
VMware is continuing to expand our Kubernetes portfolio to new infrastructure types to provide our end customers with the right application components, tools and processes, and platforms. Our mission is to enable and accelerate consistent developer experience, operations, and security experiences, everywhere.
To that end, VMware is making local versions of Tanzu products available on sovereign clouds, so customers can operate Kubernetes on the sovereign cloud of their choice. Regulated industries and government organizations that require locality and true data sovereignty will now benefit from VMware’s application modernization platform. This combined solution offers a cloud-smart approach for development and operations of Kubernetes within sovereign regulations and restrictions for application and data management frameworks. Read more.
The industry’s go-to event for all things multi-cloud
Now that you have a sneak peek into what’s new with Tanzu, it’s time to plan your agenda! We have many sessions covering these new features and enhancements across three tracks, plus lightning talks, demos, and more. If you’ll be attending this event in person and want to know where to find all things Tanzu, be sure to check out this event highlights page!
Have questions about VMware Explore Europe? Read the FAQ.
Looking for a full list of sessions from the three tracks above? Click here.
For further announcements, stay connected through the VMware Explore website, LinkedIn group, Facebook page, and Twitter.
We can’t wait to see you there!
