How to Modernize the Apps that Matter Most and Automate the Path to Production

Nearly 90% of enterprise CIOs and SVPs believe that improving their application portfolio is key to improving the customer experience, according to a March 2020 Forrester Consulting paper commissioned by VMware, “Improving Customer Experience And Revenue Starts With The App Portfolio.” And 82% recognize that end customer experience is tied to revenue growth.

In fact, one of the first questions CIOs ask me today is, “How do I modernize my applications and operations to get new features to my customers faster and in a secure fashion?”

That’s why I’m excited to announce the initial, core elements of the VMware Tanzu portfolio are now generally available.

With VMware, you now can modernize the applications that matter most and automate the path to production. You also can modernize your infrastructure by establishing a unified operating model for virtual machines and containers within your private cloud. Moreover, by taking full advantage of Kubernetes, VMware can help you extend that consistent operating model across clouds.

Simplify the Operation of Modern Infrastructure at Scale

Application modernization efforts will inevitably lead an organization to use containers—those immutable packages of code and dependencies that can be deployed almost anywhere. But when running containers at scale in production, things can get complex. Our own research reveals the top barrier to Kubernetes adoption in the enterprise is lack of experience and expertise.

VMware is taking that Day 1 and Day 2 Kubernetes operations burden away with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid—a complete, easy-to-upgrade Kubernetes runtime with pre-integrated and validated components. It can run consistently across your data center, public cloud and edge to offer a unified experience for all development teams.

We’re also making it easy to extend an enterprise-ready Kubernetes operating model across data centers and clouds for the 80% of enterprise workloads that are already running on VMware. We do this by integrating Tanzu Kubernetes Grid as a service in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, which is available as part of the cohesive VMware Cloud Foundation 4 stack. (Read more here about vSphere 7 with Kubernetes and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.)

With VMware, IT operators can provision Kubernetes clusters just as easily as they provision virtual machines. Developers are able to access conformant Kubernetes clusters through the native Kubernetes API. And the CIO now has the flexibility of a next-generation platform that can support both virtual machines and containers, the mixed workloads that make up modern applications.

As your Kubernetes footprint grows across multiple environments and clouds, you introduce greater challenges to applying consistent policy, security and compliance. That’s why we’re excited to announce the availability of Tanzu Mission Control as your centralized management platform for operating and securing your Kubernetes infrastructure. It provides operators a single governance control point while freeing developers to deploy to production without needing to know how to operate Kubernetes. Developers can get self-service access to clusters and namespaces across multiple public clouds—with security guardrails enforced at the infrastructure level by default.

Improve the Developer (and Operations) Experience

The transition from monolithic to microservices architectures has led to an explosion of open-source containers like MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch and Kafka. These components are often pre-packaged images with little or no transparency into what is in the stack. Nor do they always conform to IT security and auditability standards.

VMware is tackling this challenge with Tanzu Application Catalog, which is powered by the Bitnami library of popular packaged applications and development environments. Operators use the Tanzu Application Catalog to provide production-ready, open-source containers and Helm charts for developers to use in their custom applications.

The Application Catalog can increase overall productivity by giving developers on-demand, self-service application components while retaining the same level of compliance with IT security and auditability governance that came with maintaining them in-house. And that’s just part of how organizations can bring Dev and Ops together.

Another key piece is providing Dev and Ops with visibility into the full stack—the performance of applications and the infrastructure on which they run. Tanzu Observability by Wavefront provides metrics-driven analytics at a massive scale, enabling you to get the most out of your modern apps. It offers unified visibility for all teams—of both developers and operators—to improve code running in production across multiple clouds at scale.

Ship Great Software Faster, Today

To become a modern software organization, enterprises must simplify and automate the path to production while enabling developers to focus on creating great apps.

Hundreds of enterprises have turned to Pivotal over the past several years for that very reason. And that’s why we’re officially bringing the flagship offering formerly known as Pivotal Application Service into the VMware Tanzu portfolio as Tanzu Application Service. This all-in-one platform provides a great developer experience for delivering applications at speed while taking advantage of the cloud. According to “The Total Economic Impact Of The VMware Tanzu Application Service” Forrester Consulting study from December 2019 commissioned by VMware, Tanzu Application Service improves developer productivity by nearly 80%— faster cycle times and less time debugging that really add up.

Of course, we understand that sometimes product alone is not enough, especially given that the largest barrier to adoption of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies is lack of in-house experience and expertise. That’s where great services with VMware Pivotal Labs come in. We can work with customers to build new cloud-native applications, target existing applications for modernization and transform operations.

Enterprises that work with Pivotal Labs are forever changed, infused with new skills, ideas and repeatable patterns for application modernization.

Accelerate Your Business with VMware Tanzu

Six months ago, at VMworld US in San Francisco, we introduced VMware Tanzu as a concept. Now, we introduce it as a portfolio of products and services that are generally available.

VMware over the last two decades has transformed enterprise IT for all Fortune 1000 companies. You, too, can rely on VMware to take you on this next transformational journey.

Ray O’Farrell joined VMware in April 2003 and currently serves as executive vice president and general manager, leading the integration efforts of VMware’s expanded Modern Applications Platform business unit. In this role, O’Farrell will envision and extend the company’s strategy and operating model for delivering the Kubernetes platform of the future.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.