We are thrilled to announce the general availability of VMware Tanzu Platform 10.2, the latest long-term support track (LTS-T) release of Tanzu’s flagship application platform-as-a-service offering. Tanzu Platform is known for delivering a scalable and robust cloud application platform. It is the trusted platform running business critical applications for many of the world’s largest organizations and government agencies.
This release introduces a range of new features designed to accelerate the development of agentic AI and generative AI applications. It enhances the developer experience for improved efficiency, offering new quickstart tools for Python developers, model optimization tools, and support for Anthropic models. Additionally, it includes capabilities that streamline deployments, optimize application code, and accelerate feature release while making it easier to use the platform.
This release also brings new capabilities to Platform Engineering teams in Tanzu Platform hub. Platform teams now gain even greater insight into capacity visibility that can be further customized using labels and foundation groups. This release enhances tooling for troubleshooting, featuring topology views that visualize the business application and its dependencies down to the infrastructure. Additionally, it delivers both new out-of-the-box foundation alerts and runbooks, as well as new customizable alerts and custom runbooks, designed to decrease mean time to resolution (MTTR) in the event of triggered events or alerts.
Every business has governance and compliance requirements, and platform teams are often tasked with delivering documentation proving that CVEs have been addressed or that compliance controls are being met and adhering to common regulatory requirements. Tanzu Platform 10.2 enables platform teams to provide validation of controls more quickly with new documentation of compliance control standards necessary for PCI, NIST, and STIG compliance. Additionally, it includes new reporting that provides CVE remediation status for specific Tanzu Platform components, allowing for faster and easier vulnerability remediation.
For Tanzu Application Service 4.0 or 6.0 customers, Tanzu Platform 10.2 introduces the latest release in the long-term support track (LTS-T). Learn more about Tanzu Platform upgrade paths, benefits and additional release highlights in an upcoming webinar, Transitioning to Tanzu Platform 10: Plan Your Upgrade from Tanzu Application Service (replay available on demand).
Let’s take a look at some of the exciting new features of Tanzu Platform 10.2!
Speed up agentic and generative AI app delivery
With the Fall 2024 release of Tanzu Platform 10.0, we announced the general availability of the GenAI tile, a capability in Tanzu Platform and part of Tanzu AI Solutions. The GenAI tile is designed to help organizations deliver and scale AI applications more efficiently by providing platform teams with the ability to give developers safer, self-service access to approved models as well as observability, rate limiting, auditing, logging, and journaling for AI applications. This AI middleware layer provides a highly abstracted and consistent API interface, regardless of the underlying AI model or its location for developer consistency, seamless integration, and reduced complexity that empowers teams to focus on building and deploying innovative applications rather than vendor-specific integrations.
In Tanzu Platform 10.2, we’re extending the robust value with powerful new capabilities:
- Quick start tooling for Python developers – new Python application accelerator enables faster development for AI chat-based apps on LangChain
- Model optimization tooling – Cut costs by storing transactions and auto-formatting journals for export to leading model distillation tools to create smaller models for specific use cases, enabling more efficient and cost-effective usage of models.
- Support for Anthropic models – Integrations to connect to external public models now support Anthropic’s Claude model family, in addition to Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, and GCP Vertex, and have been promoted to generally available.
- Multi-model plan support – Platform Engineers can now configure plans that utilize multiple models. This allows developers to select a single plan from the marketplace that supports their specific intelligent application use case.
- Service Instance dashboard for model visibility – The GenAI tile now generates a service instance dashboard per plan, offering developers enhanced model and feature visibility.
Java and Python remain two of the most widely used programming languages among developers, according to the latest Programming Language Rankings, published by RedMonk. Our continuing investment in Python tooling reaffirms our commitment that Tanzu Platform is built to support any language or framework, for any application type, while delivering enhanced capabilities for Spring applications.
For more details on all of the new capabilities in Tanzu AI Solutions, please read our announcement blog here.
Streamlined Tanzu Platform installation and new Tanzu Cloud Foundry CLI
Tanzu provides a streamlined platform engineering experience through Tanzu hub, which helps eliminate context switching between tooling across foundations, consolidates the management of multiple foundations into a single dashboard improving visibility for faster troubleshooting, and more.
In Tanzu Platform 10.2, we’ve made the installation of Tanzu Platform hub a familiar and simplified experience through Operations Manager (OpsMan) via a tile. With minimal inputs and no required Kubernetes cluster configuration, platform engineering teams can now begin using Tanzu Platform hub more quickly with greater operational control and consistency to manage their foundations at scale.
This latest update also introduces the Tanzu Cloud Foundry CLI which adds new functionality and makes it easier for developers to access the latest improvements, bug fixes, and updates. The new Tanzu Cloud Foundry CLI enhances the Cloud Foundry CLI experience with CLI service discovery and new automatic upgrades, all while enabling backward compatibility. The new CLI will automatically manage updates for itself and any plugins during target upgrades or changes, simplifying platform maintenance and adoption. Platform engineering teams can push updated versions to developer teams to ensure consistency, reliability, and facilitate adoption of the latest versions and features.
Make platform and workload decisions with ease, and troubleshoot quicker
Within Tanzu Platform hub, consolidated visibility and multi-foundation views gain new capabilities for Platform Engineering teams, enabling them to optimize operational efficiency at scale.
- Know when capacity reaches its limits – Platform engineers can now see and receive alerts that notify them of overutilized or underutilized resources, enabling them to better manage resources at scale.
- Logically group foundations by region – New foundation groups provide new ways to pool capacity based on location, network segment, or tier of the environment. These groups can be utilized to centrally view utilization and capacity by region or tier of the environment.
- Application topology views ease troubleshooting – New topology views provide greater visibility to aid in troubleshooting, enabling platform engineers to understand the impacts of events or issues by seeing the dependencies from the business application down to the infrastructure platform.
- New customizable runbooks and alerts – In addition to new foundation-focused, out-of-the-box alerts and runbooks, this release brings new customizable alerts and runbooks for platform teams. This enables platform teams to alert based on custom events or triggers, with a custom runbook to help ensure app or platform issues can be addressed rapidly, decreasing the mean time to resolution (MTTR).
- Eliminate context switching with consolidated tooling – Tanzu Platform hub consolidates Applications Manager (AppsMan) and Healthwatch information for reduced context switching and shared context across teams.
Spring new life into apps with VMware Tanzu Spring
Tanzu Spring continues to run best on Tanzu Platform! Tanzu Platform 10.0 introduced faster startup times for Spring apps using CDS, enhancements to autoscaling, improved performance for Java 8 and Java 11 workloads, and more. This 10.2 release introduces new capabilities that streamline the migration of existing Spring apps onto Tanzu Platform, enhances developer productivity through AI-powered tooling, and features designed to better enable enterprise governance and compliance.
- Application Advisor can reduce the time and complexity involved in migrating brownfield applications to the Tanzu Platform by automating the generation of Cloud Foundry manifests. It also introduces new natural language integration with IDEs that can provide suggestions and upgrade advice through the platform’s MCP server.
- Beyond just monitoring compliance across your Spring apps, Application Advisor delivers powerful recommendations to better enable security and compliance, powered by enterprise-grade Spring extensions.
Core Platform Enhancements
Developer experience enhancements:
- Configurable step weights deployment – App operators can perform incremental roll-outs of canary deployments with more fine-grained control
- Addition of ‘cf-revision’ (singular) command – App developers can inspect application revisions using the command ‘cf revision’ in addition to ‘cf revisions,’ to take advantage of canary deployments, etc.
- HTTP headers for app instance routing – App developers can validate different, simultaneous revisions of an application deployment by routing traffic to specific application instances
- Metrics tag filter for app autoscaler – App operators have more customizable, fine-grained control over application autoscaling rules, such as customizable metrics and metric ratios
Platform Experience enhancements:
- Customer-managed key encryption – Enables customers to configure disk encryption using customer-managed keys for persistent disks in BOSH CPI settings
- Reduced number of fault domains – Reduce the number of fault domains migrating from unmanaged to managed disks
- Non-contiguous CIDR blogs in overlay network – Supports non-contiguous CIDR blocks in overlay network to avoid shortage of IPv4 continuous space in a CIDR range
- FIPS stemcell support for RabbitMQ and GemFire tiles – Supports more stringent compliance standards with FIPS-compatible stemcells for Tanzu RabbitMQ and Tanzu GemFire data services in Tanzu Platform
- Backporting OpenTelemetry – Minimizes foundation size to 15% with support for OpenTelemetry
VMware Tanzu Data Services
Tanzu Platform includes several Tanzu Data Services that have also undergone updates.
- Tanzu for MySQL now supports incremental backups, enabling platform engineers to save only the changes since the last successful backup, resulting in more efficient restores. New health metrics for monitoring these backups have also been introduced.
- Tanzu for Postgres introduces high availability for Postgres service instances across multiple Cloud Foundry foundations, ideal for disaster recovery scenarios. This capability is powered by the proven Patroni framework. The release also includes support for the Postgres 16 engine. Additionally, it enables in-place upgrades from Postgres 15 to 16 with minimal expertise and downtime.
- Tanzu for Valkey, featuring the latest Valkey engine v8.1 and in-place upgrade support, is now generally available. Key features include backup and restore across deployments, scheduled backups, and migration from Redis to Valkey via brownfield deployments.
- FIPS stemcell support is now available for Tanzu RabbitMQ and Tanzu GemFire tiles. This enables organizations to meet stricter compliance requirements by running these data services on FIPS-compatible stemcells within the Tanzu Platform. With this announcement, all core Tanzu Data tiles now feature FIPS stemcell support.
- The Tanzu Data Management Console (TDMC) 1.1 introduces advanced PostgreSQL fleet management with high availability through Multi-AZ deployments, automatic failover, and enhanced resilience for mission-critical workloads. It adds asynchronous replication and fast failback for disaster recovery, minimizing downtime and data loss. Strong security can be enabled through LDAP synchronization and certificate-based authentication, facilitating consistent user management. Tanzu Data Management Console supports air-gapped environments for compliance in regulated industries.
In addition to the new capabilities delivered in this release, we continually gather feedback from customers to bring enhancements that make the lives of both application and platform teams a bit easier. This release includes more functionality than can be covered in this post. For a comprehensive list of enhancements and capabilities, please visit the Tanzu Platform release notes page on https://techdocs.broadcom.com.
Please join Nick Kuhn and me for a special webinar on June 26th at 10am PT titled: “Transitioning to Tanzu Platform 10: Plan Your Upgrade from Tanzu Application Service,” where we’ll discuss the Tanzu Platform upgrade paths, benefits of this and other recent releases, and the long-term support tracks (LTS-T). If you’re an existing Tanzu Application Service or Tanzu Platform customer, this is a conversation you don’t want to miss!
For more information on Tanzu Platform, use-cases, and customer stories, visit https://www.vmware.com/products/app-platform/tanzu or reach out to your VMware account team to schedule a demo.
