DEVOPSdigest

Broadcom announced the general availability of VMware Tanzu Platform 10 - scheduled for November 27, 2024 - that establishes a new layer of abstraction across Cloud Foundry infrastructure foundations to make it easier, faster, and less expensive to bring new applications, including GenAI applications, to production.

New capabilities lower infrastructure costs, improve the security, observability and governance of applications already in production, and extend the simplicity of the Cloud Foundry development experience to Kubernetes for new custom apps as well as commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications on a VMware Cloud Foundation-based private cloud.

Tanzu Platform 10 represents the first release of Tanzu Platform for self-managed, air gapped environments, optimized for VMware Cloud Foundation-based private clouds, but also supports deployments in public cloud. These new capabilities include:

- Built-in brokering and platform-level governance for models and tokens used by GenAI apps

- New application visibility across multiple foundations, zones and regions with integrated runbooks to improve application resiliency

- An up to 70% reduction in infrastructure footprint for new Cloud Foundry foundations

- Plug-and-play Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) libraries in VMware Tanzu Spring for real time security and enterprise class data sharing (CDS) for 30% faster launch time

- Validated, high performance, high availability configurations for native data services

- Helm-based, COTS application support with advanced cluster management for containers on VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated

- New Cloud Foundry-like developer experience on Kubernetes for custom applications

“This release benefits our customers across financial services, retail, government, and manufacturing who run some of the largest application deployments on Tanzu’s Cloud Foundry based Platform,” said Purnima Padmanaban, General Manager of the VMware Tanzu Division of Broadcom. “In many cases, as application deployments have grown to span many Cloud Foundry infrastructure foundations, they have required augmented processes and tooling. Tanzu Platform 10 introduces a new layer of abstraction to Cloud Foundry architecture to simplify management, improve security and enable governance. It also extends the same industry-leading easy ‘cf-push’ developer experience to Kubernetes which dramatically reduces the complexity and operational expense associated with running applications on Kubernetes at enterprise scale.”

Tanzu Platform, built on the open source, multi-cloud application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, is trusted by hundreds of customers and thousands of application teams to simplify application operations by eliminating the need for developers to think about infrastructure while permitting platform engineers to continuously repair apps and dependencies, regularly rotate credentials, and proactively repave their entire infrastructure without business disruption. Tanzu Platform 10 introduces a new layer of abstraction to Cloud Foundry deployments with a common control plane and user interface. The functionality of the control plane will continue to expand over time to manage larger and more complex application deployments and eliminate the need for platform engineers to bridge foundations with manual processes or brittle tooling. This first, self-managed release introduces the following:

- Built-in service broker and governance for GenAI apps – VMware Tanzu AI Solutions, now delivered in Tanzu Platform 10, enables developers to build, bind, deploy, and scale GenAI-powered intelligent applications seamlessly on Tanzu Platform through the new GenAI tile, just like any other application. This equips developers with the necessary tools to drive innovation while maintaining security standards, and equips platform operation teams with a means to control access to vetted models. Additionally, Tanzu AI Solutions is integrated with VMware Private AI Foundation, powered by NVIDIA, to host models on GPU infrastructure, thereby enhancing GenAI workloads with increased privacy. This integrated solution accelerates time-to-market, optimizes infrastructure performance, boosts scalability, and empowers application development teams to effectively leverage GenAI.

- An up to 70% reduction in infrastructure footprint to support new Cloud Foundry foundations – Tanzu Platform 10 reduces the initial virtual machine count for a new foundation from 13 to 4, allowing platform engineers to bootstrap new foundations on a small footprint wherever additional capacity is required and to scale over time, opening up new cost-effective deployment scenarios for more distributed application deployments. In addition, Tanzu Platform 10 leverages OpenTelemetry (OTel) infrastructure that reduces the space and processing required for logs and metrics resulting in another 15% infrastructure savings, and creates options for larger foundations.

- Plug and Play FIPS libraries in VMware Tanzu Spring for real-time security – By utilizing the FIPS-approved BouncyCastle security provider and automated setups (FIPS-140-3 and NIST 800-53), the Enterprise Spring Boot Governance Starter library helps Spring developers adhere to stringent compliance standards and generate governance reports for their applications. By building actuator endpoints into the applications, enforcement can be effected in real-time whenever an application falls out of compliance.

- Enterprise-grade Class Data Sharing (CDS) support for a 30% reduction in Spring application startup time – Delivered in Tanzu Platform 10, this integration with Spring Boot 3.3 and Tanzu Platform's commercial Buildpacks provides a seamless method to leverage CDS by pre-processing necessary runtime components. Additionally, memory consumption reduces by 15% after startup, allowing subsequent application launches to skip certain class loading and initialization steps, significantly cutting down startup times.

- New multi-foundation visibility – Many enterprises have deployed fleets of Cloud Foundry foundations to support applications across data centers and geographic regions. With the new multi-foundation visibility, these organizations can now see all foundations and deployed applications in one consolidated view, along with health, utilization and capacity information, enabling faster application triage, and more efficient capacity planning. Additionally, application teams can troubleshoot issues by utilizing real-time application logs now available as part of Tanzu Platform.

- Integrated runbooks to improve resiliency – Our Cloud Foundry experts have authored dozens of knowledge base articles to maintain the health and performance of Cloud Foundry foundations. The new integrated runbooks incorporate that knowledge into Tanzu Platform itself, driving more appropriate alerts as well as remediation recommendations contributing to higher uptime and reduced recovery time.

Secure and speedy access to data is an inherent attribute of Tanzu Platform. With integrated data services for storing, caching and messaging, Tanzu Platform lets platform engineers provide developers the ability to instantly create and bind their applications to the data services they need, while ensuring they are meeting data handling and protection requirements. New capabilities include:

- Validated, high performance, high availability (HA) configurations for native data services – delivers pre-configured and validated configurations of MySQL, Postgres, RabbitMQ, and Valkey ready for highly available, mission critical deployments within a foundation and delivered directly through Tanzu Platform. This eliminates months of configuration and tuning and the need to hire and retain operational expertise for each of these popular data engines.

- Expanded Postgres extension ecosystem unlocks new application capabilities – New Tanzu for Postgres expands support for the Postgres open source ecosystem with a wide array of extensions including PGVector for GenAI workloads, PostGIS for geospatial processing, PL/R for advanced analytics, pgbouncer for connection pooling performance, pg_audit for security, and more.

Tanzu Platform excels in supporting 12-factor application patterns that are built for scale and resiliency with clean contracts between the application code, the runtime requirements and infrastructure. However, business requirements may require additional applications or services that require a Kubernetes-based platform runtime. Many on-premises Kubernetes-based platforms have proven exceedingly complex and expensive with too many open source options and infrastructure burden placed on developers while platform engineering workload is increased as they try to build, support, and troubleshoot complex application dependencies. Tanzu Platform 10 introduces new capabilities to leverage the power and flexibility of the Kubernetes ecosystem, plus the proven developer experience and day 2 operational automation of Cloud Foundry, now optimized for a VMware Cloud Foundation-based private cloud.

- New Cloud Foundry-like developer experience on Kubernetes for custom applications – One of the most popular features of Cloud Foundry is the simple, declarative operations and abstractions provided to developers that take the guesswork out of application deployment. That same declarative structure is now available for the Kubernetes platform runtime in Tanzu Platform 10. This allows application development teams to leverage Kubernetes with the same ease of Cloud Foundry, completely masking the complexity associated with other Kubernetes-based platforms, and without requiring large teams of Kubernetes experts to build, tune, and maintain those environments.

- Seamless integration of Tanzu Platform 10 with VMware Cloud Foundation provides an out of the box, prescriptive solution that enables customers to rapidly get to production with their applications on private cloud.

- Helm-based COTS app support with advanced cluster management for containers on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated opens up new application deployment use cases that were previously not supported, allowing Tanzu customers to expand existing Cloud Foundry workloads using Kubernetes as a target environment for COTS application workloads. Tanzu Platform mission control (previously VMware Tanzu Mission Control, the Kubernetes cluster management capability underpinning Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes) provides the ability to attach and manage Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated clusters and allows Cloud Foundry platform engineers to leverage their existing BOSH skills to manage complex applications across different platform runtimes.