I distinctly remember a conversation with a large financial services customer a few months back, when I described our strategy for VMware Tanzu Platform and how it provides app teams with their preferred application runtimes and a consistent developer experience, whether apps are deployed to Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes. It’s the best of both worlds, without tradeoffs. This CTO said, “I would be a hero if I could offer my Kubernetes teams a Cloud Foundry-like experience.”
Last month, we delivered on this promise and officially introduced Tanzu Platform, providing customers with the choice and flexibility they want in a single cloud native application platform. Developers now have simple golden commands and powerful abstractions to build, bind, deploy and scale applications on Cloud Foundry or any Kubernetes. In short, it offers teams the same level of developer simplicity and app-centricity regardless of application requirements or runtime needs.
The four golden commands (build, bind, deploy, and scale) jumpstart app development, eliminate tickets, reduce onboarding time and the need for specialized skills. Tanzu Platform delivers on the speed and simplicity that developers expect of cloud-based managed services, but with the governance and cost efficiency that enterprises need for their most critical applications. Developers gain a simple, elevated experience that allows them to focus on coding. Further, Tanzu Platform offers efficient lifecycle management across public and private clouds, on VM-based app containers with Cloud Foundry (formerly Tanzu Application Service) or with any conformant Kubernetes (formerly Tanzu Application Platform).
While Tanzu Platform is multi-cloud and polyglot, it is uniquely optimized for VMware Cloud Foundation and optimized to harness the power of Spring development framework. The Tanzu Platform introduction marks the start of an exciting new era for Cloud Foundry users. All of the capabilities and features of Tanzu Application Service are now part of a Tanzu Platform runtime called Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry. Customers that run applications on Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry will benefit from new innovations and integrations, such as:
- Unified, multi-foundation app-to-platform visibility across Cloud Foundry foundations, Kubernetes clusters and application deployments, available Summer 2024. View app performance and governance, such as FIPS compliance status, and quickly resolve issues with AI-powered insights and natural language search.
- Lighter, faster, easy to manage Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes will be available in Summer 2024. Benefits for platform teams include significant footprint reductions for new foundations, smaller logging infrastructure, and simplified compliance and governance with FIPS-compliant stem cells. Developers building next gen apps can leverage trained LLMs through the AI tile.
Every day, platform engineering and operations teams wrestle with complex, often sprawling infrastructure, exponentially growing dependencies and varying requirements supporting different application archetypes. Now imagine that these requirements could be streamlined and automated across that complex infrastructure. With Tanzu Platform, platform engineering and operations teams now have the power to continuously repave and repair infractures, rotate credentials and replicate environments (4 R’s) with zero application downtime. Tanzu Platform delivers on the speed and simplicity that developers expect of cloud-based managed services, but with the governance and cost efficiency that enterprises need for their most critical applications.
Whether organizations choose to deploy applications to Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, or both via our flexible licensing model, all Tanzu Platform users have access to additional capabilities and enhancements, including:
- Data services with fleet management and high availability support for relational databases, messaging, and caching with Tanzu for MySQL, Tanzu for Postgres, Tanzu RabbitMQ, and Tanzu for Redis.
- Access to customized, continuously maintained open source components with Tanzu Application Catalog. Providing developers self-service access to a private catalog of custom-configured, pre-packaged open source software while seamlessly enforcing compliance, security, and customer-specific requirements.
- Application-to-infrastructure visibility and AI-powered insights in Tanzu Platform hub. Tanzu Platform users will have contextual information and fast issue resolution, and have access to Spring app topology and the ability to plug into existing visibility and monitoring tool portfolio.
- DevSecOps tooling for application teams with Tanzu Salt (SaltStack) provides commercial support built into Tanzu Platform. Tanzu Salt helps manage application compliance and vulnerability, with closed-loop automation and remediation that goes beyond scanning to actually find and fix critical issues.
- High performance and auto-compliance for Spring. Developers will experience high-performance optimizations with additional benefits such as access to app health assessments directly in Tanzu Platform and automatic enforcement of corporate policies for Spring/Java and Spring-specific observability instrumentation. Tanzu Platform includes entitlement to enterprise support and commercial Spring repositories for version continuity, faster app startups, increased scale and performance.
It’s exciting to build on Tanzu's legacy of empowering enterprises to deliver better software, faster. We relish the idea of making today’s IT teams the heroes among their application teams – that’s our super power. The introduction of Tanzu Platform extends our continued commitment to customer-focused innovation, allowing them to develop, operate and optimize across the entire application lifecycle. We look forward to sharing details on additional capabilities that enhance the experience for app teams, platform engineers and operators in Summer 2024. You can learn more about Tanzu Platform capabilities in this newly released blog and on the Tanzu website.