General availability of Tanzu Application Platform follows September 2021 public beta
VMware’s efforts to transform Kubernetes from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to a full-blown Platform as a Service (PaaS) reached a crescendo this week with the general availability of Tanzu Application Platform. The app modernization toolkit combines various components to make it easier for developers to build and manage cloud apps using Kubernetes.
VMware first introduced Tanzu Application Platform in September 2021 during VMware’s SpringOne developer conference. It debuted as a public beta version. VMware emphasized Tanzu Development Platform’s multi-cloud support and suitability for any Kubernetes distribution. That included Kubernetes IaaS offerings from the major hyperscalers. Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine are all represented.
“Tanzu Application Platform is an application-aware platform that allows organizations of all sizes to make software development a core competency, unlocking developer potential to deliver outstanding digital outcomes for the business,” explained VMware’s Ajay Patel in a blog post. Patel is senior vice president and general manager of the VMware Modern Applications Platform Business Unit.
Developing modern apps with Kubernetes can be an overwhelming experience for developers and organizations, Patel said. Tanzu Application Platform aims to simplify this process, he explained.
“Developers are often left to explore and choose from this overwhelming landscape of seemingly incoherent tools that are tough to set up and maintain and that work inconsistently across teams. And connecting them to other apps and infrastructure is extremely complex,” said Patel.
The problem isn’t limited to developers, either. Patel pointed out that operations teams have to manage custom software supply chains. Navigating DevOps and information security headwinds can further complicate operations.
“Tanzu Application Platform enables you to make more secure products because operators can configure the supply chain with baked-in security and compliance guardrails, making those considerations mostly invisible for developers, thereby helping you avoid downtime that could damage your brand,” said Patel.
VMware emphasizes that Tanzu Application Platform includes an end-to-end supply chain with pre-instrumented components meant to work “out of the box.”
Mitigations against Log4Shell and other exploits
What’s more, Patel added, Tanzu Application Platform can help to mitigate against vulnerabilities like the ”Log4Shell” Log4J exploit first reported in December.
“Within Tanzu Application Platform, VMware Tanzu Build Service uses Cloud Native Buildpacks to automatically create and update containers from validated building blocks. Tanzu Build Service users could easily mitigate the vulnerability by adding an environment variable to their run image and rebasing all existing applications built on it,” said Patel.
VMWare’s Telco Cloud Platform and Tanzu attracted Kyndryl to announce a new collaboration in November. Kyndryl was previously IBM’s managed service business unit, known as GTS, now rebranded and independent. Kyndryl said it will tap VMware’s portfolio of products to speed cloud transformation for its clients. Areas the companies expect to offer “differentiate solutions” include edge computing, security and multi-cloud infrastructure and management.
In a statement, Kyndryl said it would expand its existing multi-cloud advisory, implementation and management services to support the VMware Tanzu platform and deploy vSphere workloads to VMware multi-cloud infrastructure running in all public clouds.
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