With customers still jittery about Broadcom Inc.’s plans for VMware Inc., its new subsidiary is mounting a push to assure them that its Tanzu application development and modernization toolkit is not only alive and well but a key part of the post-acquisition strategy.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE and a pre-recorded event on LinkedIn, Purnima Padmanabhan (pictured), general manager of the Tanzu division at Broadcom, said Tanzu emerged from the acquisition as one of four VMware operating units, along with the Cloud Foundation private cloud platform, advanced networking and security and the software-defined edge. The post-acquisition VMware is focused on simplifying Tanzu, improving application management capabilities and driving acceptance of the Spring framework for Java development.

“Our goal is to deliver a platform that accelerates application delivery,” she said. “The Tanzu brand is associated with Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes and many underlying technologies, and we will stay up to date with the latest and greatest. It’s a refinement and focus of strategy.” Cloud Foundry is a multicloud application platform as a service that VMware developed and released as open source.

Push for simplicity

Padmanabhan said Tanzu development is being driven by three priorities: easier transactions, a common set of application program interfaces for developers and a common control plane “that gives you a continuous view of your environment so the operator can see what apps are deployed and how they connect to the platform and the infrastructure.” The core control plane is Tanzu Hub, which provides a continuous view of the entire operating environment.

Part of the simplification strategy is to combine what she called “a bag of parts” that Tanzu users had to assemble in the past, including the development platform, Tanzu Mission Control, Tanzu Service Mesh, application services, Spring, Tanzu Data Services, Tanzu Intelligence Services, CloudHealth and Tanzu Observability.

“We will simplify our portfolio,” Padmanabhan said. “We will set up cluster management and connect the service mesh and the load balancer automatically so you don’t build each component individually. Whether you use the Tanzu platform to deliver to a Cloud Foundry-type runtime on virtual machines or Kubernetes, we will deliver a common set of promises.”

VMware is committed to enabling customers to deploy Tanzu-built applications on the cloud platform of their choice, although they’ll get the greatest power and functionality from Cloud Foundry. “We give you multicloud capability, but we are the best with Cloud Foundry,” Padmanabhan said. “It is a fully contained solution that gives the developer a very simple set of interfaces with the container system baked into the platform.”

Organizations that use Cloud Foundry can use any Kubernetes runtime environment they choose as a foundation while taking advantage of ecosystem extensions unique to Cloud Foundry.

Connect to AI services

Tanzu is well-positioned to address the current boom in artificial intelligence development with its Greenplum data warehouse, analytics and AI platform, Gemfire in-memory key-value store and RabbitMQ message broker, Padmanabhan said. “As a platform engineer, you can make these data services available to a developer with a single click or a single command like ‘bind,’” she said. “The ‘bind’ command not only works with Tanzu data but connects to any external data system. We are seeing with AI use cases that is becoming more important.”

Tying it all together for developers is Spring, which VMware says is the most popular Java framework with 50% annual growth in its user base. “When you build applications in Spring, we make them up 10X better,” Padmanabhan said in the LinkedIn event earlier today. “Tanzu is the best place to land your Spring applications.”

Developers can use the Spring framework to integrate models built in Python or .NET into their Java applications or to connect to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Bedrock or OpenAI LLC’s GPT-4. “The power of Spring AI is not in re-creating the model but in connecting models to your application for inferencing,” she said. “Customers are saying it’s suddenly made AI so much more accessible to them.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE