All you need to know about VMware Tanzu

Overview of Tanzu

VMware Tanzu Application Platform is a modular, application-aware platform that provides a rich set of developer tooling and a pre-paved path to production to build and deploy software quickly and securely on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster. It also improves application environment’s security posture by securing the contents of container images and how containers interact in production across clusters and clouds. 

Mission

As VMware look to their mission to help customers transform their businesses, Tanzu will be able to help you across the full spectrum of modernizing your application portfolio. 

Applications Are Evolving Fast

• Every organisation is trying to innovate faster, delivering more value at greater speed and they are doing this by modernizing the application portfolio. This is often voiced as an ‘application modernisation’ or ‘digital transformation’ initiative. 
  • These enterprises have millions of lines of existing code and these applications are difficult to change and are updated infrequently. But there is also a lot of opportunity for these enterprises to unlock value of these systems and deliver it to their customers continuously. 

Multi-cloud Operations is The Future

• A key part of modernizing applications is determining the landing zones for those applications. And there are a lot of options for customers to industrialise this. 
  • The public cloud services are attractive to developers. They need access to cutting-edge technologies to help them build the best and most competitively applications. And the technologies they need to do that won’t always come from a single cloud provider.
  • Customers also want to run their workloads where they’ll be most cost-effective and most performant and they want to retain the flexibility to shift those workloads as needed.
  • But multi-cloud infrastructure brings more complexity to operations in teams as they must now manage various cloud properties - along with on-premises infrastructure.
  • To overcome the complexity of multi-cloud architectures, teams need valuable insight across all layers of public and private clouds with the right levels of governance, observability, and automation for Day 2 operations.

Where Customers Need Help

The exact reasons for modernizing applications and building newer, better ones are different for every organisation, but everyone is driving toward the same ultimate goal.

1. Cloud Infrastructure Transformation

Every repetition, from IaaS to Kubernetes, brings more automation to provisioning, updating, and managing application infrastructure—all of which are necessary to keep up with today’s rapid pace of software development.

2. DevSecOps Transformation

DevSecOps (Development + Security + Operations) is another major transformation encouraging app modernisation. Although technologies and team structures change, the core tenets of DevOps, centered around automation and pipelines, remain largely unchanged. 

3. Security

Automated security processes baked into the application lifecycle has become an important part of the DevOps process as microservices and containers become commonplace, where development picks up, and software supply chain vulnerabilities add up.

4. Application Transformation

The evolution of architectures is also having a major effect on the way clients modernise applications. Modern architectures can free up developers and application teams to release code faster, and to create more modular, flexible, and resilient applications. However, not all applications or services need to be rearchitected, so it’s worth analyzing customer’s applications to determine the best path forward.

How to Become Great at Modern Software

• Let’s look at the Tanzu portfolio in the context of your day-to-day work of building, delivering and managing modern apps - from how you support developer velocity to operating in production at scale. 
• This is an effort that requires collaboration across development, security and operational teams, ensuring each team’s needs are met, so that each role can be optimized for their jobs. Developers can focus on delivering key business logic. Security teams can ensure security and compliance guardrails are in place, and operations teams can focus on the platform and the applications and clusters running in the environment.

1. VMware Tanzu Application Platform

It is a rich set of developer tooling with a pre-paved path to production for building and deploying software quickly and securely on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster. If you want to deliver business critical applications to market more quickly. It enables you to build better software faster through a superior developer experience that works with any compliant Kubernetes offering.  

VMware Tanzu Application Platform, a superior multi-cloud developer experience

• Tanzu Application Platform delivers a superior, end-to-end multi-cloud developer experience so developers can extract more value from business applications. 
• Developers get a same starting place for their cloud native apps with application accelerators. Built by application architects and made available to developers, these templates consist of the skeleton code, configuration, and cloud native patterns combined with the organization’s best practices and security policies that save developers significant time in bootstrapping new applications. It enables organizations to accelerate time to value.  
• In addition, developers get a consistent GUI to underlining services and APIs making them easy to discover and integrate with other apps. They can work with instant access to developer tools. Developers can debug a running container on any Kubernetes cluster and quickly update the code in a container to test. This enables higher developer productivity and flexibility. 
• Tanzu Application Platform dramatically simplifies platform deployment process across multiple clusters and clouds with installation profiles. Ops teams can use pre-defined installation profiles to deploy the components required to meet business needs. They allow users to get started quickly and focus on running their workloads and building secure applications, rather than how to deploy the platform in an optimal way.
• No more “YAML” for deploying apps on Kubernetes. Operators can use the supply chain choreographer to create pre-approved paths to production and can customise it to bring their own opinions to meet business needs. Operators configure the supply chain with baked-in security and compliance guardrails. 

2. VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations 

• It is a cloud-agnostic platform that enables your teams to consistently and cost-effectively build and operate modern, distributed applications securely and at scale - anywhere they want. If you want to operate cloud native applications at scale in your enterprise-across Kubernetes and clouds. It enables you to build a platform for modern apps that's reliable, secure and scalable.
• Within Tanzu portfolio, it is key offering for any customers looking at infrastructure modernization using Kubernetes. It provides the foundation for a modern, multi-cloud container infrastructure, and really to help customers simplify, secure and optimise the deployment and management of a K8s platform across multiple clouds. 

Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu

Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is a tool that aids organizations in discovering application types, visualizing application topology, choosing a modernization approach based on scores, and containerizing and migrating suitable legacy applications to enhance business outcomes.

• Discovery

Application Transformer scans VMs, gathering as much information as possible. The information includes application names, files and resources pools, processes, etc. Then, Application Transformer creates application topology, giving customers complete visibility into their application environment. 

• Analysis

Once the application inventory is created, Application Transformer can generate an application topology to help you visualize your environment. If you have vRealize Network Insight in your environment, Application Transformer can generate end-to-end views by leveraging network flow information from vRealize Network Insight. 

• Transform

This is also known as containerization. Application Transformer creates (Open Container Initiative) OCI-compliant container images for applications components. Applications like Oracle WebLogic and Apache Tomcat can be containerized with few simple steps. Application Transformer generates Kubernetes artifacts such as YAML files, allowing customers to deploy container images in the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters quickly.

VMware Tanzu Summary

• This is how Tanzu can help you across the full spectrum of modern app development, delivery and operation.
• It can provide the foundation of a modern application platform that will enable you to scale multi-cloud and Kubernetes operations– with the right levels of governance, observability, and automation.
• It can ensure your software supply chain is secure from app development to apps running in production.
• It can enable you to deliver a cohesive developer experience across any Kubernetes to speed application development and delivery cycles.
• Importantly, it can help your teams to transform with the skills and expertise they need in this world of multi-cloud and modern apps.