Enterprises are under increasing pressure to digitise their businesses by modernising app development and IT operations, as traditional approaches simply cannot deliver the competitive advantages or rapid innovation that businesses need today.
Developers and IT teams must adapt to the cloud-native app development reality because, in a world where organisations are defined by the digital services they can deliver, modern applications aren’t just the backbone of digital transformation, they’re the currency of this digital economy.
At VMware Explore 2022 in San Francisco this week, VMware is introducing advances to its VMware Tanzu portfolio – Tanzu Application Platform and Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations – that unlock developer productivity, deliver end-to-end security from build to production, and enable secure multi-cloud operations at scale, regardless of where they are in their Kubernetes journey.
“Companies face pressure to optimise their application development and delivery efforts for speed, resilience, and security as they move to become a true digital enterprise. Platform teams must focus on delivering a great developer experience and path to production to speed velocity, while also providing a solution for deploying and running apps more securely, reliably, and at scale on any and many clouds,” says Ajay Patel, senior vice-president and GM: modern apps and management business group at VMware.
“Whether our customers are starting from the data centre with existing apps or new apps built in the cloud, VMware Tanzu meets them where they are so they can get their apps to production faster.
“For those just starting their Kubernetes journey, vSphere with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid helps you get a developer ready platform,” he adds. “For those who have already started with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or any Kubernetes distribution, they can use Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations and Tanzu Application Platform for scaling your operator and developer experience.”
VMware’s State of Kubernetes report [1] found that 65% of organisations already run Kubernetes in production, and 48% expect to dramatically expand their adoption over the next year.
VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations is the foundation for building and operating a modern container infrastructure at scale across any Kubernetes and any cloud.
According to new data commissioned by Enterprise Strategy Group, Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations delivers 70% to 80% less administrative cost across all Kubernetes operations, 58% reduction in response time, and three to five times faster time to value for our customers, simplifying and better securing Kubernetes operations for modern applications.
Streamline and secure Kubernetes at scale across clouds
VMware continues to meet customers wherever they are in their journey of adopting Kubernetes infrastructure – whether a single team, a single cloud, or operating enterprise-wide in multi-cloud – they are relying on VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations to establish the right foundation and set up an environment for the complete development to production lifecycle.
This week, VMware is announcing updates to key components in Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations – VMware Tanzu Mission Control, VMware Aria Operations for Apps (formerly VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront), and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid – to simplify Kubernetes delivery, management, and reliability.
As part of VMware’s continued commitment to supporting customers at every stage of their Kubernetes infrastructure maturity, VMware Tanzu Mission Control is announcing several new features that extend and optimise multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management capabilities:
- Preview for Lifecycle Management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters: VMware Tanzu Mission Control will enable direct provisioning and management of Amazon EKS clusters so that developers and operators will have less friction and more choices for cluster types. DevOps teams will be able to simplify multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management with centralised lifecycle management of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Amazon EKS cluster types.
- Integration with VMware Aria Automation: Tanzu Mission Control is now integrated with VMware Aria Automation, formerly known as VMware vRealize Automation Cloud, to help customers consolidate their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Kubernetes platform operations. This integration enables operators to design cloud infrastructure and underlying services, on any vSphere-based or public cloud and also deploy Kubernetes clusters directly via VMware Aria Automation while simplifying management at scale by inheriting Tanzu Mission Control policies through its cluster groups and complying to VMware Aria Automation rules and constraints.
- Continuous and Consistent Cluster Lifecycle Management via GitOps: VMware Tanzu Mission Control users can now employ clusters via GitOps for consistent Kubernetes cluster configuration. This feature provides a method for managing cluster configurations with VMware Tanzu Mission Control via continuous delivery from a Git repository. Continuous delivery through VMware Tanzu Mission Control is built on Flux CD and enables users to attach a Git repository to a cluster and sync YAML artifacts from the repository to the cluster which can introduce consistency to the GitOps toolchain.
- Application Reliability with Cross-Cluster Backup and Restore: Kubernetes application operators can now have more flexibility for their applications with VMware Tanzu Mission Control cross-cluster backup and restore. This feature enables application operators to move applications between any cluster, running on any cloud, or on-prem data centre for improved application resiliency and simplified site recovery.
As enterprises modernise their existing application portfolio and build new cloud-native applications, the need for application and Kubernetes log management at scale will continue to grow.
VMware’s new Unified Observability Platform by VMware Aria Operations for Applications, formerly VMware Tanzu Observability, provides simplified full-stack visibility with great user-experience, and predictable pricing for multi-cloud environments.
The new Unified Observability platform amplifies existing capabilities with the addition of log management to deliver contextual data across traces, metrics, and logs enabling more actionable insights and reducing MTTR (mean-time-to-resolution) at a massive scale.
The platform unifies data, insights, and actions across IT, and offers customised and out-of-the-box dashboards for applications, with more than 250 vendor integrations to start capturing real-time data from any stack in minutes, eliminating data silos, war rooms, and alert fatigue.
With containers being deployed increasingly on-premises, in public cloud, and at the edge, it is essential for standardisation of Kubernetes across these environments.
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is engineered to simplify installation and Day 2 operations by packaging together key open-source technologies and automation tooling to help teams get up and running quickly.
VMware is introducing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0, designed to help IT teams and developers with a streamlined experience for managing and provisioning the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters.
New capabilities add flexibility and control for cluster creation with Cluster Class, open-source API alignment, application lifecycle management capabilities, and Carvel-based tooling. It is tightly integrated with and embedded in vSphere 8, allowing customers to transform their existing compute infrastructure into an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment across clouds.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid now also supports smaller cluster sizes of a single control node and a single worker node, available in VMware Edge Compute Stack 2.0, bringing simplicity and scale to the Enterprise Edge.
Improve developer productivity and simplify DevSecOps
VMware customers with a cloud-native applications strategy are looking to VMware Tanzu Application Platform as a value stream platform to manage complexity in building, configuring, connecting, and deploying new apps with a secure path to production.
VMware Tanzu Application Platform is designed to unlock developer productivity by providing Application Accelerators and a pre-paved path to production with all the needed components preconfigured for developer teams to build and deploy software quickly and securely. At VMware Explore 2022,
VMware is pre-announcing new capabilities in the Tanzu Application Platform that further enhance developer and application operator experiences for any Kubernetes environment, increase supply chain security, and offer additional ecosystem integrations.
Major updates include:
- Availability on RedHat OpenShift: To give increased flexibility to our customers regarding their Kubernetes platform choice, Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 will be available on RedHat OpenShift, running in vSphere and on bare metal. Leverage your existing investment in RedHat OpenShift to realise the value of Tanzu Application Platform.
- Air-gap support: Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 is now available for highly regulated and disconnected environments with the addition of air-gapped installation, helping to ensure that components, upgrades, and patches are made available to the system and that they operate consistently and correctly in the controlled environment — in addition to keeping the organisation’s data more secure at all times.
- Secure Software Supply Chain Enhancements: Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 seamlessly shifts security left with three new capabilities that increase efficiency across dev and ops and accelerates the path to productions:
The Tanzu Application Platform expands the ecosystem of supported vulnerability scanners with a beta integration with VMware Carbon Black scanner (in addition to Snyk and Grype) to enable customer choice and leverage their existing investments in securing their supply chain.
A new, centralised vulnerability monitoring dashboard will aid app teams with their pre-deployment security checks and secure app deployments.
Software Bill of Materials (SBoM) support for SPDX in addition to CycloneDX to give teams choice in how they import and export SBoMs via the Tanzu insight CLI plug-in.
Dynamic API specification registration: Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 automates the experience in publishing, consuming, and collaborating on APIs for application development. Integration of the Backstage API Docs plugin into the Tanzu Application Platform GUI now auto-registers and publishes the workload specification through a secure supply chain to the API catalog with role-based access control settings.
Jenkins CI/CD integration: Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 extends the ability for users to leverage existing Jenkins pipelines in Tanzu Application Platform with deeper Jenkins integrations. The integration will allow the Jenkins CI component to be used as part of an out of the box supply chain to manage specific steps in the overall CI/CD pipeline, and to automate triggering of Jenkins jobs from Tanzu Application Platform supply chains.