Kathy Gibson reports from VMworld 2020 – Cloud and cloud-native architectures have lowered the barrier to entry for new applications.

In fact, as many as 75% of new applications will be custom-built, says Ajay Patel, senior vice-president and GM: modern applications at VMware.

“This is because modern applications deliver real impact,” he explains.

Organisations define three motivations for modernised apps, Patel says.

The first is to deliver better customer experience, which is absolutely necessary in the digital world.

The second is to reduce the risk of software vulnerabilities, to be sure they will be secure when running on the cloud.

The final motivation is leveraging the power of cloud to enable breakthrough innovations.

“As we define app modernisation, we need different approaches to address the spectrum of clients’ portfolios.”

The lift-and-shift approach plays into VMware’s hybrid cloud story and allows applications to be moved to a VMware-compatible cloud.

An optimise approach uses containers to rearchitect apps with minimal changes.

A replatforming or rewriting approach can be taken selectively for some legacy applications.

Transform is an approach where legacy app code is distributed into microservices.

Build refers to the development of net new cloud applications.

All of these approaches can be taken to modernise apps to run on-premise, in the public cloud or, increasingly, on the edge, says Patel.

“It is all about increasing automation and driving feature velocity. So developer productivity and infrastructure modernisation need to go hand-in-hand.”

VMware is well-positioned to help customers with their app modernisation journeys, Patel adds. The company aligns applications and infrastructure so that apps can run on the customer’s platform of choice.

“This alignment of app and infrastructure is what customers are looking for – it is the number one problem that CIOs have indicated to us.”

VMware helps customers to simply containerise their existing workloads, leveraging the modern distribution ability of Kubernetes, with both policy control and developer self-service built into the infrastructure.

“We give customers the flexibility to leverage their VMware investments with Kubernetes support, so that can delpy DevOps-ready infrastructure, support a spectrum of apps, and simplify cloud operations.

VMware recently announced vSphere 7 with Tanzu, which has been well received in the market. Today, it debuts Tanzu Editions as well.

The Tanzu Editions launched now are Basic and Standard, with Advanced and Enterprise set for availability later this year.

Basic is the availability of Kubernetes in vSphere, while the Standard version allows Kubernetes to operate across multiple clouds.

The Advanced edition will embrace DevOps to deliver workloads on Kubernetes, and the Enterprise edition will drive developer velocity with an automated application platform.

“We are confident that we can cover all customer needs,” Patel says. “Our vision is to provide a complete solution for any app on any cloud, be it on-premises, a public cloud or on the edge.”

VMware has also announced updates to Tanzu support across VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution, and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and a partnership with GitLab.

VMware Tanzu products include organic innovations and technologies acquired with Bitnami, Heptio, Pivotal, and Wavefront.

More than 75 independent software vendors (ISVs) are part of the VMware Tanzu community. Together, VMware and its partners are finding new and better ways to unite application developers and operations teams around the shared goal of faster release cycles.

As a result, hundreds of customers now use Tanzu products and are running more than 1-million containers in production. Plus, every minute an average of 36 new projects are initiated on Spring (start.spring.io).

VMware now supports millions of developers every month as they start new projects using the Spring framework for microservices and the Bitnami community catalogue for container images.

Today, VMware is announcing Tanzu support for VMware Cloud on AWS, and preview support for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. VMware and Microsoft are also working closely together to make the preview available soon to early adopters.

These updates provide customers with fast and more secure ways to extend workloads to the cloud, and further bolster VMware’s ability to offer customers a ubiquitous platform for running applications on the infrastructure of their choice.

VMware is also announcing a partnership with GitLab, the DevOps platform delivered as a single application. VMware and GitLab are both committed to uniting application developers and operations teams around the shared goal of fast and more secure release cycles.

To that end, GitLab with Tanzu helps customers streamline the development pipeline, and consistently get to production faster.