Modern Apps

VMware IT Enables App Developers and Ops Teams to Deliver a Delightful Experience to Customers, Partners, and Colleagues

by: VMware Vice President, Digital Transformation Hari Ramakrishnan

VMware IT supports a diverse set of applications, environments, and technology platforms. Our developers need to rapidly build and deploy modern apps into a stable, scalable runtime environment, while our operations teams need to efficiently handle change requests related to design, log aggregation, and configuration monitoring.

To address these dual needs, VMware IT created the Chief Digital Transformation Office (CDTO) Modern App Platform (MAP), powered by VMware Tanzu™. CDTO MAP provides high availability (infrastructure requests have zero wait times), security, and self-service capabilities at each step in the app lifecycle to enable developers to deliver new features and releases with minimal intervention from operations teams.

App Modernization

VMware is in the middle of a business model transition—from perpetual-license software to subscription software and software as a service (SaaS). This is driving a digital transformation across our major functions—products, go-to-market, and operations. As a result, VMware IT must deliver many new digital capabilities in an accelerated timeframe, while continuing to maintain our high standards of performance, reliability, quality, and user experience.

To be able to quickly address requests for new features, VMware IT had to modernize several mission critical apps, particularly ones that directly impacted customer experience, such as My VMware. We rearchitected such apps into microservices and deployed them in a container environment provided by CDTO MAP. For new apps, we drove our developers to adopt Agile and Lean practices, such as Scrum and Minimum Viable Product, which we codified into a set of software development principles we call the “VMware Digital Way”.

Build Applications … Quickly

App developers prefer to spend their time understanding customer needs and creating software features and services to address those needs.

CDTO MAP enables this by providing components for developers to quickly build apps (Java Spring libraries, API gateways, etc.). It also delivers a library of certified open-source images that a developer can safely leverage. In addition, CDTO MAP automates the build, integration, and deployment of our modern apps and open-source components.

Run and Manage Applications … Efficiently

Operations teams want a runtime environment that adheres to MARS (monitoring, agility, resiliency, and security) requirements, specifically an environment that:

  • can be Monitored effectively.
  • is Agile (able to quickly respond to change requests).
  • is Resilient (scalable, with high-performance).
  • is Secure.

CDTO MAP enables this by providing a MARS-compliant platform that can run modern apps in containers, as well as in VMs. As a result, we automated several tasks, including patching open-source images and maintaining compliance with information security policies, resulting in overall operational efficiency improvements of 20 percent.

By leveraging the capabilities of CDTO MAP, VMware IT developers have been able to deliver apps with greater velocity, quality, performance, and security. But, most importantly, it has enabled us to deliver a delightful experience to our customers, partners, and colleagues.

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Hari Ramakrishnan is Vice President, Digital Transformation at VMware, responsible for driving application modernization efforts within VMware IT to enable the company’s digital transformation. Prior to that, Hari led a cross-company transformation program to grow the VMware SaaS business. He also led the launch of VMware Marketplace, a portal that enables third-party independent software vendors to list solutions for deployment on VMware platforms. He also served as Chief of Staff to the VMware CEO.  Before joining VMware, Hari was a principal at Boston Consulting Group, where he led strategy and operations engagements with technology companies and IT organizations. Hari holds a B.S. in electrical and electronics engineering from BITS Pilani, an M.S. in computer science from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, and an M.B.A from UCLA.

VMware on VMware blogs are written by IT subject matter experts sharing stories about our digital transformation using VMware products and services in a global production environment. Contact your sales rep or [email protected] to schedule a briefing on this topic. Visit the VMware on VMware microsite and follow us on Twitter.   

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