VMware overhauls Tanzu platform with automation, AI capabilities

VMware has announced a series of expansions for its Tanzu platform, with the aim of accelerating application development and assisting customers with intelligent insight.

Its application platform Tanzu Hub will now act as a converged platform for multi-cloud environments, providing customers with oversight of all their applications regardless of where they are located through an API-based data fabric and artificial intelligence (AI).

The firm also announced a number of updates to Tanzu Application Platform, its end-to-end platform for the building and deployment of software, and the release of the brand-new Tanzu Intelligent Services for processing data and troubleshooting.

First and foremost among the new features for Tanzu Application Platform is the Application Engine, a runtime that brings container networking and container computing together and can scale and perform processes such as mutual authentication automatically.

Purnima Padmanabhan, SVP and GM of Modern Apps & Management Business Group at VMware, said that the new updates for the platform would help firms to “develop the golden path to production”.

Through Tanzu Intelligent Services, the firm businesses will also be able to derive insights from their data using machine learning (ML).

This comes bundled with features such as ML forecasting for cloud costs, currently in beta, as well as automatic aggregation of applications logs, metrics, and other data through intelligent automation and a conversational AI interface.

The hope is that through Tanzu Intelligent services, customers will be able to troubleshoot easily across their cloud environment. In addition to its investigatory abilities, it also comes with a function to enforce policy across environments, as well as one for app migration.

VMware underlined the announcement of Intelligent Assist, its new chatbot based in generative AI  that allows customers to interact with their data using natural language processing (NLP). It is hoped it will allow customers to get to the single source of truth faster and more efficiently.

The intent for Tanzu Hub is to allow customers to operate applications at scale on any cloud or environment, including Kubernetes, and also give businesses the freedom to update underlying infrastructure without any downtime.

“Tanzu Application Platform is for building modern applications - today that’s Kubernetes and over time it’ll be any modern applications with an expanded application runtime,” said Padmanabhan.

Additional updates for Tanzu Application Platform will include an improved Developer Portal, which comes with support for open source plugins, as well as lifecycle management for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and support for .NET Spring Framework 6 and Spring Boot 3. 

“The Hub itself is able to provide information and data about both your brownfield environment and existing apps, all types of apps whether they are modern, at the edge, monolithic, distributed - it doesn’t matter,” Padmanabhan added.

“By bringing all that application and environment information together, because as I mentioned it’s taking the power of the entire Aria management portfolio, you can analyze all your applications, you do the cost performance and security management for those applications, and you can do remediation for those applications. Over time you can also transform and modernize them.”

Tanzu Hub is grounded in the same knowledge graph as VMware Aria, which was announced in August 2022 at VMware Explore US. This provides near real-time access to data across a multi-cloud platform.

Through the updates, VMware has aimed to improve the software agility of its customers. The firm said that 91% of CIOs it speaks to have identified app strategy as their top priority, encompassing modernization, migration, and speed to market.

Many companies have grasped modernization with both hands, moving to technology such as multi-cloud architecture, Kubernetes, and a wide range of open-source tools. 

At VMware Explore Europe 2022 VMware vowed to fight ‘cloud chaos’, in which businesses become overwhelmed by multi-cloud environments and siloed workloads that have arisen as a result of this mass migration and modernization.

Tanzu Hub is a fully federated platform, which will enable customers to plug in information from third-party solutions, and VMware described it as a unified platform for both cloud ops and platform engineering.