VMware has announced many innovations at its own Explore 2023. Tanzu has been firmly revamped in the process, with Tanzu Intelligence Services and a beta for the Tanzu Application Engine as key highlights. The company hopes to simplify cloud management and app delivery as a result.
VMware found that more than 70 percent of all CIOs are developing net-new cloud-native apps and that applications suitable for any cloud environment prevail. In other words, an app must be dynamically deployable today. That simplifies the implementation of AI technologies, Kubernetes, open-source solutions and multi-cloud-based ecosystems, VMware said.
“Applications are a driving force behind the most innovative businesses and best-in-class customer experiences. Delivering apps at scale can be an immense undertaking and it is becoming increasingly complex. Our goal is to increase our customers’ business agility by accelerating application development, delivery and management,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager, Modern Apps and Management Business Group, VMware. “Tanzu and Aria are now evolving into the next generation of Tanzu Application Platform and the new Tanzu Intelligence Services. With an application-centric focus and integration through common data and controls, VMware Tanzu is providing a streamlined platform engineering and cloud operations experience, and better software agility.”
Tanzu Intelligence Services
It can be difficult to get an all-encompassing overview of the entire IT infrastructure, from apps to infrastructure and services. VMware Aria already offered capabilities as a multi-cloud management tool, where these things can be controlled with a common data model.
Tanzu Intelligence Services goes a step further: it promises to enable a proactive approach to cloud management with optimizations for cost, performance and security of applications even when they reside in different cloud environments. Intelligent Assist deploys generative AI to provide a chatbot that can streamline IT staff workflows. Currently, this feature is in technical preview form. It is far from the only AI offering from VMware, which announced at Explore 2023 a partnership with Nvidia for its new Private AI Foundation.
Also read: VMware and Nvidia launch Private AI Foundation: AI that keeps enterprise data secure
In addition, Tanzu has expanded to include CloudHealth in beta form, which can schedule budgets with the help of machine learning and drive appropriate Kubernetes formats without causing downtime. Next up is Tanzu Insights, due to arrive in the third quarter of 2024. This tool promises to allow Ops teams to gain greater visibility within Kubernetes, AWS and Azure environments.
Also included is Tanzu Guardrails, a multi-cloud governance tool that introduces policy-based automation for AWS and Azure. Tanzu Transformer provides support for migration assessment and planning within VMware Clouds and public clouds. This is done through so-called planning workflows that can be integrated with other platforms via APIs (this feature is still in beta).
Application Platform
For the Tanzu Application Platform, there are more ways to simplify platform engineering. These include (again in beta) the Tanzu Application Engine, a way to quickly indicate when availability, secure connectivity or scalability is required for applications. These so-called “business requirements” can be entered at runtime and operate “automatically and continuously” within a curated Application Space. Once again, VMware promises that this functionality continues to work seamlessly from cloud to cloud and between different Kubernetes clusters.
Also included are new capabilities for lifecycle management, or tracking the development surrounding an application from inception to release. These features are available for Azure Kubernetes Services, AWS Elastic Kubernetes and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Also, cluster cost visibility can now be achieved for Kubernetes FinOps.
There is also a new developer portal for curating app templates and secure supply chain automation. Finally, there’s a new platform engineer admin console to configure and control Tanzu Application Platform.
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