by: VMware Senior Director – IT Application Operations Varinder Kumar; VMware IT Manager Manas Singh; and VMware IT Director Mukund Yadav
The Challenge
Like many IT organizations, VMware’s IT team, also known internally as the Chief Digital Transformation Office (CDTO) supports a diverse set of applications, environments, and technology platforms. This diversity is compounded by the numerous custom applications that our developers must create, and the many associated change requests related to design, log aggregation, and configuration monitoring. Additionally, significant technical debt and high operational costs, combined with change freezes, effectively reduced developer velocity. CDTO needed a platform that enables developers to build and deploy modern applications faster and also run their apps on infrastructure that offers more stability at scale.
Faster Pace
To accelerate VMware’s digital transformation, we created the CDTO Modern App Platform, powered by the VMware Tanzu portfolio, a suite of VMware products that enables developers to rapidly develop, deploy and manage modern applications. Along with providing high availability (infrastructure requests now have zero wait times), the platform also provides self-service capabilities at each step, allowing developers with relevant access to continue delivering new features and releases with minimal intervention from operations teams.
The key components of the CDTO Modern App Platform include:
- an application catalog that ensures the availability of certified images of packaged applications for deployment.
- customized pipelines that provide self-service deployment features to development, operations, and release teams.
- a robust Kubernetes foundation with autoscaling capabilities that enhances platform resiliency.
- a load balancer that integrates with the foundation to provide ingress and network virtualization services.
- observability and management tools that provide an in-depth, end-to-end view of the platform.
Build, Run, Manage
This next-generation cloud-native platform enables developers within CDTO to build and deploy the necessary artifacts using out-of-the-box integration and source-code management tools to fulfill the static security scanning prerequisites. Kubernetes is at the heart of the platform and provides a stable, secure, consistent deployment experience across environments. The self-service features allow teams to build, run, and manage apps without interfering with each other.
Leveraging the capabilities of this platform allowed CDTO to execute with a lean and agile mindset. For example,
- we built a custom ticketing system for our company-wide help desk in just 30 days. This system required 99.99 percent availability, and our platform was able to meet this need.
- VMworld.com runs on the platform and can support several hundreds of thousands of concurrent sessions.
- our HR benefits site runs on the platform, using certified open-source images from the Tanzu Application Catalog. This puts our Security and Compliance team at ease, eliminates the dependency on other infrastructure, and allows us to absorb more workloads onto a single, scalable platform.
In each of these cases, CDTO was able to:
- deliver a superior customer and/or colleague experience.
- reduce the amount of time it took to build software.
- integrate systems in real-time.
- increase scalability and user accessibility.
- improve security with certified container images.
Stay tuned for the next blog on how we are using the CDTO Modern App Platform to drive VMware’s digital transformation.
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.
