VMware Inc. today announced enhanced multicloud deployment capabilities in a new version of its Tanzu application development platform.

Tanzu is an application modernization toolkit that packages together components for building, deploying and managing applications that run in software containers coordinated by the Kubernetes orchestrator. Enhancements announced today will provide for better visibility, more proactive optimization and multicloud management through the integration of Tanzu and VMware’s Aria cloud management suite.

“Over 90% of CIOs tell us that driving the speed with which they deliver applications is very critical,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager in the modern apps and management business group at VMware. “The new Tanzu story is about driving software agility for businesses.”

Conquering complexity

Padmanabhan said the cloud-native development landscape characterized by new metaphors such as elastic scaling, microservices, infrastructure-as-code, observability and software catalogs presents unprecedented complexity to IT organizations. VMware is taking a “fundamentally different approach” to cloud development anchored in a common application platform and well-defined development best practices called Golden Paths, she said.

“Golden paths to production capture application knowledge and practices to deploy, manage and scale seamlessly as the underlying infrastructure is updated,” she said. “The new Tanzu accelerates application delivery by letting you develop with Golden Paths, operate at scale with intent-based runtimes and optimize governance and continuous improvement.”

VMware said the Tanzu Application Platform now combines platform engineering and operations disciplines with existing cost optimization, governance, performance visibility and cloud federation capabilities built on a common foundation called Tanzu Hub. The new Tanzu Application Engine incorporates platform engineering principles to enable developers to request business requirements such as high availability, enhanced security, and scalability that are automatically deployed and continually enforced across multiple Kubernetes clusters and clouds.

Multicloud Kubernetes operations can now be monitored with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Kubernetes Services in addition to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Elastic Kubernetes Service, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and cluster cost visibility provided by VMware Tanzu CloudHealth.

A developer portal has been added that extends curated application templates and provides for more secure supply chain automation with further customization available through beta support for an ecosystem of open source and Backstage plugins.

AI-driven optimization

Also new is an enhanced enterprise developer experience based on VMware’s Spring Framework 6, Spring Boot 3, .NET Core and deeper integration with integrated development environments. A new platform engineer administration console can be used to configure and operate Tanzu Application Platform capabilities and applications.

VMware is also introducing what it calls Tanzu Intelligence Services based on a combination of features from the Aria portfolio and a common data platform. Tanzu Intelligence Services are intended to optimize the cost, performance and security of applications across clouds using integrated machine learning.

The new Intelligent Assist feature, which is now in a tech preview, provides a conversational chatbot interface based on generative AI that leverages the federated data architecture across Tanzu Hub’s features.

Tanzu CloudHealth enables cost savings through ML-powered forecasting and dynamic Kubernetes rightsizing without downtime. Tanzu Insights enables better troubleshooting and issue resolution with ML-powered visibility and diagnostics across distributed Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Azure environments. Now in beta test, availability is planned for the third quarter of fiscal 2024, which begins in August of next year.

Tanzu Guardrails improve multicloud governance through new policy-based automation to create landing zones on AWS and Azure and adds automated policy enforcement. Tanzu Transformer supports migration assessment and planning to VMware Clouds and public clouds with planning workflows.

Padmanabhan said VMware’s ultimate goal is to get organizations to what she called a “world-class” application release schedule. Traditional development processes result in new code releases between one and four times per year, she said. In contrast, world-class organizations roll out new code up to 50 times per day.

Photo: VMware