As cloud native concepts and adoption grows, it’s essential to invest in capabilities that accelerate developer productivity, drive revenue, and stay competitive.
This is according to VMware, that has announced new capabilities across the VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria platforms to empower customers with the capabilities to take a cloud-smart approach to modern application delivery across any cloud.
Purnima Padmanabhan, General Manager and SVP, Modern Applications and Management Business Group, VMware, says, “Our customers across the enterprise are engaged in a cumbersome balancing act - juggling multiple tools, teams, clouds, and operating models while at the same time keeping developers productive and the operations team equipped to keep pace.
"This scenario demands a new approach around a common cloud native app platform and a multi-disciplinary platform engineering team.
“Customers tell us they need to rapidly innovate while at the same time manage cost, security, and performance. In response, we expedited the launch of new capabilities across VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria. We are committed to helping customers drive innovation and optimisation every step of the app development and cloud management journey.”
Tanzu Application Platform 1.5, has new capabilities designed to enable companies to build and deploy more software more quickly and securely, through a set of developer tooling. It offers pre-paved, more secure paths to production customised to their business.
The Tanzu Application Platform 1.5 release enhances end-to-end app security, streamlines developer and platform engineering experiences, and expands support for third-party integrations.
This includes improved developer and platform engineering experiences, more streamlined deployments at scale on EKS with AWS QuickStart, expanded Azure support, out of-the-box and expanded customer choice of security tools like auto-configuration of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and support for external security tools for secrets management.
As part of its commitment to supporting customers at every stage of Kubernetes platform maturity, VMware also announced several updates to Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations. These updates aim to increase security, choice and operational efficiency of multi-cluster and multi-Kubernetes platform operations across any cloud.
Tanzu Mission Control now supports full lifecycle management of new and existing AWS EKS clusters, the ability to mutate the security context for containers and pods and allows the modification of OPA Gatekeeper policy settings at all levels such as organisation, cluster group, and cluster.
These capabilities enable platform teams to adopt a ‘shift-left’ approach to security and greater flexibility to navigate the ever-changing world of Kubernetes security policy management, the company states.
Additionally, the company is introducing innovations across the VMware Aria platform including Aria Hub powered by Aria Graph, Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, and Aria Guardrails.
VMware Aria solutions are designed to help cloud operations teams to harness multi-cloud capabilities with intelligent insights into distributed environments, and provide the capabilities that enable optimised cost, performance, and security of applications and infrastructure aligned to business priorities.
In times of increased budget scrutiny, the increased governance, security, and cost management that the VMware Aria portfolio provides is vital for business leaders focused on efficiency and scale.
VMware improves multi-cloud visibility with the addition of Google Cloud support in VMware Aria Hub Free Tier alongside AWS and Azure, adds support for Kubernetes environments with a new infrastructure dashboard with service-to-service topology view, and adds VMware Aria Guardrails capabilities, including landing zones policies templates and config drift management, to the Free Tier.
For expanded multi-cloud cost management, VMware Aria Cost now includes support for Alibaba Cloud, enabling customers and partners to gain visibility into all Alibaba Cloud costs and usage in a single platform and streamline decision-making.
The addition of Alibaba Cloud expands existing VMware Aria Cost support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, VMware Cloud on AWS (beta), data center, and containerised environments.
VMware Aria Cost is also expanding its Kubernetes reporting capabilities by introducing the ability to right-size Kubernetes environments to optimise cloud-native application environments in addition to the cloud.
Lastly, VMware continues to automate and streamline cloud infrastructure management with full-stack visibility across private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
VMware Aria Operations introduces a new integration with Aria Observability (a multi-cloud observability solution) to enable IT teams to gain contextualised visibility across their infrastructure, Kubernetes environments and applications with the aim to eliminate the need for disparate tools to effectively manage multi-clouds and provides a holistic platform view enabling faster troubleshooting and reducing mean-time-to-resolution to improve application performance.