In November 2023, Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware in one of the largest technology acquisitions in recent times. In doing so, it ushered in a new era for the entire Tanzu portfolio of products and services, many aspects of which came to fruition through other acquisitions.
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth was founded in 2012 as CloudHealth Technologies with the intention of helping guide customers throughout their multi-cloud journey. For the team behind Tanzu CloudHealth, this important technology embodied the concept that Benjamin Mee shared in his novel We Bought a Zoo. Mee shares that “throwing yourself into worthwhile, fruitful hard work that you believe in…is a kind of luxury not everyone gets to experience.” Cloud financial management was the defining and driving passion of CloudHealth.
Even through two acquisitions, that vision, commitment, and drive has not wavered. When VMware acquired CloudHealth Technologies in 2018, it invested and grew the CloudHealth brand by providing resources and the backing of a giant in the industry. CloudHealth by VMware (now Tanzu CloudHealth) became an industry leader recognized by Forrester and by ISG as a powerhouse in the cloud financial management market.
The dedication grew to cloud financial management as the FinOps Foundation was created in 2019. FinOps began to take root as a cultural practice, and Tanzu CloudHealth embraced the practice and became the first Premier Member of the FinOps Foundation. Tanzu CloudHealth employees began to represent the brand on numerous boards inside the FinOps Foundation.
The acquisition by Broadcom
Since Broadcom announced its intention to acquire VMware in May 2022, the Tanzu CloudHealth team has continued to innovate, develop, and grow an industry-leading solution that is focused on the customer, with several major features rolling into the UI since the acquisition announcement.
One example is the Anomaly Detection engine released in July 2022. Leveraging AI and machine learning, and targeted at detecting, analyzing, and determining the root cause of anomalous cloud spend, Anomaly Detection allows customers to get in front of something that could become a serious issue for public cloud consumers.
In the above screenshot, we get a glimpse of Tanzu CloudHealth’s Anomaly Detection dashboard, which gives users a quick glance into the potential anomalous spend in their public cloud accounts. As we can see above, this cloud account has had nine anomalies over the last seven days totaling almost $1,000. The ability to catch anomalous spend earlier enables customers to stay on top of their cloud usage and ultimately save money.
The innovation didn’t stop with Anomaly Detection. Tanzu CloudHealth started its shift left movement with Webhooks. With “shift left” being defined as “putting data into the path of engineers,” the ultimate goal is to help engineers and developers make impactful decisions, improvements, and address issues earlier in the process. Webhooks allows customers to put Tanzu CloudHealth into their workstream seamlessly.
In 2023, we introduced further enhancements to Tanzu CloudHealth’s FinOps for Kubernetes functionality. Our customers gained enhanced visibility and optimization recommendations with the ability to rightsize Kubernetes resource requests. The rightsizing of Kubernetes resource requests gives users the power to define their organization’s ideal optimized Kubernetes infrastructure and compare it against their custom built efficiency targets. Customers can then take action, leveraging Tanzu CloudHealth recommendations to rightsize their infrastructure resources.
Even more recently, Tanzu CloudHealth has seen the general availability of another key machine learning–powered feature, forecasting. Using a customer’s own historical data to account for trends and seasonality along with machine learning, Tanzu CloudHealth’s forecasting engine gives customers the ability to predict their future cloud expenditures confidently with functionality like the ability to compensate for custom growth factors, exclude certain cloud services, target specific business units or cost centers via Perspectives, and save and compare multiple historical forecasts.
This screenshot shows one of the latest enhancements to Tanzu CloudHealth’s Forecasting engine as it became generally available the Save and Compare feature. Using this feature, customers are able to quickly compare two or more saved forecasts showcasing the cost deviation in a quick graph while detailing out some of the input differences that were used to build the individual forecasts.
The future of Tanzu CloudHealth
The team behind Tanzu CloudHealth remains committed to supporting customers on their multi-cloud journey. Through a partnership with AWS and WattTime, Tanzu CloudHealth is no longer just striving for a more cost-efficient cloud practice, but a more environmentally friendly one as well. Announced as general availability in January 2024, the Tanzu CloudHealth GreenOps dashboard and FlexReport dataset provides customers with a view into the operational carbon emissions of their cloud infrastructure. This visibility gives thousands of customers around the world the ability to build and cultivate a culture of sustainability.
Beyond GreenOps in 2024, CloudHealth customers will be receiving Bring Your Own Data (or BYOD) functionality. BYOD, currently in Private Beta, gives customers the ability to incorporate independent datasets into CloudHealth, like bringing in data from clouds that are not natively supported in the platform. Leveraging FlexReports, BYOD will enable customers to use CloudHealth as their single platform for comprehensive visibility of their multi-cloud infrastructure regardless of cloud or clouds that they have chosen to use.
For the Tanzu CloudHealth partner community, Broadcom’s Vice President of Global Partner and Commercial Sales, Cindy Loyd, recently shared that “all active VMware resell partners (more than 18,000) [were invited] to participate in the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program.” This includes partners that are leveraging a Tanzu CloudHealth solution that helps them centralize customer management, streamline billing, and drive profitability.
Tanzu CloudHealth’s “worthwhile, fruitful hard work” isn’t over. It’s just begun. As the FinOps and GreenOps movements continue to grow and mature, Tanzu CloudHealth will continue to grow and mature as well.
No matter if you’re just getting started on your FinOps journey or are well down the path, let Tanzu CloudHealth and its years of maturity and innovation join you in your own meaningful hard work. Learn more about getting started with Tanzu CloudHealth.
