UPDATED 09:00 EDT / JANUARY 11 2022

CLOUD

VMware eases app modernization with official launch of Tanzu Application Platform

Virtualization software giant VMware Inc. is embracing the developer shift to building on the Kubernetes software container orchestrator with the launch of its Tanzu Application Platform into general availability today.

The Tanzu Application Platform was first announced in beta test mode in September. It’s an application modernization toolkit that packages various components developers can use to build, deploy and manage apps that run on Kubernetes.

As VMware explained in a blog post, Tanzu Application Platform provides a rich set of developer tooling along with a “pre-paved path to production” that allows users to build and deploy software quickly and securely on any public cloud platform or on-premises Kubernetes cluster. It means enterprises can create revenue-generating applications faster, because developers will spend less time on stitching together the various components needed to get them up and running, the company said.

Kubernetes is open-source software that’s used to orchestrate large clusters of containers. They in turn host the components of modern applications that have far greater agility, being able to run on any compute infrastructure. As enterprises look to reinvent legacy apps for the public cloud, most choose to build on Kubernetes. Hence, it has become one of the fastest-growing open-source projects ever.

The problem is that building on Kubernetes isn’t always easy. The ecosystem has grown so fast that it’s now populated by hundreds of incoherent tools that VMware says are difficult to set up and maintain and work inconsistently across teams.

“Even after accumulating a set of disparate tools, developers find themselves wasting a lot of time editing a series of YAMLs instead of developing innovative code,” VMware explained in a blog post. “Operation teams on the other hand need to manage too many bespoke software supply chains and face trouble integrating existing DevOps and security practices, while managing multiple cloud environments running multiple apps.”

These are the challenges VMware aims to overcome with the Tanzu Application Platform. With it, developers can quickly get started in building new apps or modernizing existing ones, using preconfigured templates for cloud-native platforms known as “App Accelerators.” They save a significant amount of time in bootstrapping new applications, VMware said.

Moreover, according to VMware, Tanzu provides a consistent user interface where developers can bring services and application programming interfaces into one portal, so they can be discovered and integrated with apps more easily. Tanzu Application Platform also provides easy access to dev tooling for rapid iteration and debugging of code.

James Watters, chief technology officer of the Modern Application Platforms Business Unit at VMware, said in a December interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE that Tanzu is really about lightening the load for application developers.

“We’re basically trying to reduce the burden on the developer from having to understand everything about Kubernetes to really understanding [just] their domain of the application,” Watters explained (below).

VMware believes Tanzu Application Platform will prove to be a hit in multiple industries, as it says app modernization has become a broad imperative for the entire digital world. For instance, it’s partnering with the U.S. Army in an effort to build its first software development unit, known as the Army Software Factory. That initiative aims to equip soldiers to take up cloud-native app development practices and build software for the military, using Tanzu as a fundamental building block.

Here’s more from Watters on how developers can use Tanzu to simplify modern application development:

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE

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