As organisations come to grips with the reality of a permanent digital-first world, the pressure to digitise and modernise operations remains high. While this modernisation is imperative, it’s equally difficult; true digitisation and transformation efforts are complex, extensive, and must happen without compromising a company’s ability to support ongoing business needs. Teams are challenged to build applications that are more reliable, secure, intelligent, and adaptive and must deliver them faster, at scale, and across any cloud. At VMworld 2021, advances to its VMware Tanzu portfolio to enable management and operation of applications at scale and provide developers with the autonomy to build and deploy apps on any cloud.

“The changes brought on by accelerated digital transformation initiatives mean software development teams are challenged to build apps that are more reliable, secure, intelligent, and adaptive. They must deliver them faster, at scale, and across any cloud. That’s a daunting prospect no matter where an organisation is in its modernisation journey,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Modern Apps & Management Business Group, VMware. “With the breadth and depth of the Tanzu portfolio, VMware is uniquely positioned to meet customers where they are now, providing the tools, training, enablement and services that will help them progress along their entire app modernisation journey, across infrastructure, applications, and any cloud.”

VMware Tanzu application platform adds capabilities to beta release

Introduced in its first beta¹ at VMware SpringOne 2021, Tanzu® Application Platform delivers a superior developer experience for enterprises building and deploying apps and APIs on any Kubernetes. It gets software teams to production faster and sustains them over time by automating source to production pipelines and coordinating the efforts of development and operations teams.

At VMworld, VMware is announcing new capabilities to the Tanzu Application Platform Beta that will deliver the full end-to-end developer and operator experience including:

• Supply chain choreography: based on the open source cartographer project, allowing app operators to create pre-approved paths to production for developers that integrate Kubernetes resources and existing toolchains
• Developer tooling including IDE plugins: giving developers the opportunity to interact with the platform or its open source components easily and efficiently to execute important and frequent pre-commit development tasks
• Intrinsic security: adding features for signing, scanning, and storing images along the path to production
• Service bindings: Operators can specify how endpoints and credentials from data services are exposed to workloads in a portable and Kubernetes-native way
• Source controller: Enables app developers to create or update workloads from local source code
• Convention Service: a framework for platform operators to configure policies of deployed workloads to enable that all workloads to follow the best practices.

Introducing Freely Available Software to Experience VMware Tanzu

VMware Tanzu Community Edition is a freely available, easy to manage Kubernetes platform for learners and users. Community-supported, the open source software distribution can be installed and configured in minutes on a local workstation or cloud of choice, and automates end-to-end application delivery with a complete platform for application developers, IT Operators, and DevOps engineers.

VMware Tanzu Community Edition will enable learners and users to:

• Explore Tanzu independently with freely available software and services. Users can download no-cost, open source software that is unencumbered by usage restrictions or functional limitations; enhance learning with free access to top-notch education and training resources, and get extra help with community support that’s backed by committed and knowledgeable experts.
• Take on new challenges confidently with the same software used in Tanzu commercial editions. Proven, enterprise-class software enables end-to-end application delivery automation today, while making sure that skills, knowledge, and artifacts are fully transferable for use with Tanzu commercial editions.
• Get up and running in minutes on a local workstation or in a preferred cloud environment. Users can quickly build a complete Kubernetes-based platform customised to their needs, and run it on a local workstation, in vSphere, or in a public cloud with compact, single node and multi-cluster configurations.

Additionally, VMware is announcing a free-tier of VMware Tanzu Mission Control -- Tanzu Mission Control Starter is a multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management solution available as a SaaS service. Users can leverage Tanzu Mission Control Starter to get global visibility and policy control over Kubernetes clusters – whether on-premises or in any public clouds. Users can combine Tanzu Mission Control Starter with Tanzu Community Edition to get started on running and managing Kubernetes-based containerised apps at no cost. And for those not currently using Tanzu but running Kubernetes with other providers (such as AKS, GKE, EKS), those existing clusters can be attached to Tanzu Mission Control Starter to centrally manage them.

References:

1. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for VMware's offerings in this presentation remain at the sole discretion of VMware