Adopting a multi-cloud strategy is essential to the success of modern enterprises, fueling growth and innovation by increasing flexibility while addressing necessary security and compliance requirements. In parallel, there is a rising need to consistently deliver, operationalize, and manage application sprawl across public and private clouds, or at edge locations to reign in exponentially growing complexity. Today at VMware Explore 2022 Singapore, VMware (NYSE: VMW) announced advancements to its VMware Tanzu® cloud native app portfolio and VMware Aria cloud management platform to deliver a cloud smart approach to cloud native application development, delivery, and management that supports customers at every step of their journey, across any Kubernetes and across any cloud.
“We know that no two application modernization journeys are alike, and organizations need freedom to select the right cloud, software artifacts, and services, for the right application, based on those individual application needs. But as businesses expand to new clouds to leverage unique services, the lack of skilled developers, Kubernetes expertise, security, compliance, and management complexity of operating across clouds are often cited as leading challenges,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Modern Apps & Management Business Group, VMware. “Platform teams need solutions that enable developer velocity, establish standard guardrails, and implement secure software pipelines to accelerate time to value, empower self-service, while unifying visibility and management to capitalize on the benefits of multi-cloud. Today’s enhancements across VMware Tanzu, VMware Image Builder™, and VMware Aria portfolios represent the latest milestone in VMware’s commitment to supporting our customers’ unique transformations with intelligent, holistic tools that deliver greater flexibility, consistency, and choice.”
Deliver Application Building Blocks for Developers to Align with Security and Compliance Requirements
Open source is at the core of enterprise innovation with rapid adoption across enterprises in development, but use in production has slowed due to concerns on addressing security and lifecycle management, as reported in VMware’s State of Secure Supply Chain Survey 2022.(1) To address the growing needs around managing the content that enters into the corporate software supply chain, VMware will announce the beta launch of VMware Image Builder, the Bitnami engine powering the automation behind the packaging, verification and distribution of VMware Application Catalog™ artifacts. VMware Image Builder is an API-first SaaS solution that enables automation of the creation of secure, trusted, and continuously maintained software artifacts in alignment with corporate compliance standards to publish to developers as building blocks in the development process. VMware Image Builder enables packaging artifacts into multiple formats (Containers, Helm, Carvel, OVA), followed by the ability to trigger a range of verification tests including compliance check, functional, performance tests and vulnerability scans on a variety of Kubernetes distributions and VMware vSphere® across all major cloud platforms.
Harness Any Kubernetes on Any Cloud with VMware Tanzu® for Kubernetes Operations
VMware’s State of Kubernetes report(2) found that more than 40% of respondents utilize hybrid cloud models and 52% choose multiple public cloud vendors – revealing the state of cloud chaos many organizations are working to navigate. VMware’s Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations helps teams enable the right Kubernetes environment anywhere while standardizing and simplifying the management and security of those applications and environments.
At VMware Explore, VMware will announce updates to key components of Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations – including VMware Tanzu® Kubernetes Grid™, VMware Tanzu® Mission Control™, and VMware Tanzu® Service Mesh™ Advanced edition – to optimize operations for any Kubernetes at scale, running on any cloud or at the edge, helping customers achieve faster development cycles and time to market for the workloads their business depends on. The new VMware Tanzu enhancements make Kubernetes optimized for edge environments, provide consistent Kubernetes management to on-prem, air-gapped environments, and bring Kubernetes operations to more public clouds.
Today, VMware will announce Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1, which introduces support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, in addition to existing support for AWS, Azure, and vSphere, giving customers even more flexibility and consistency in deployments along their multi-cloud journeys. VMware will also announce a new initiative to design and offer self-managed, private deployments of VMware Tanzu Mission Control, which provides automated, policy-driven management and security support to customers as they scale Kubernetes cluster deployments. Customers that must operate in on-premises and air-gapped environments can benefit from full control of their entire fleet of clusters and network infrastructure connectivity. In addition to these updates, Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced will include additional capabilities to allow operators to automatically discover Kubernetes clusters, enable onboarding of those clusters for secure connectivity, and take advantage of new GitOps support to further unify operations with Kubernetes clusters.
Reimagine multi-cloud management with VMware Aria Hub™, VMware Aria Graph™
As IT teams accelerate app development and leverage a multi-cloud environment, platform teams must increasingly rely on cost, performance, security, and configuration data – often sitting in disparate tools – to understand the complete characteristics of the application that they are building. New enhancements to VMware’s Tanzu portfolio are complemented by new and expanded VMware Aria capabilities for cloud native application and multi-cloud management.
Unveiled at VMware Explore U.S. in San Francisco, VMware Aria Graph is a graph-based data store technology that provides a near real-time map of applications and clouds with management insights from customers’ existing VMware Aria solutions as well as federated third-party management tools. VMware Aria Graph is available within VMware Aria Hub, a new platform that provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment. Together, the VMware Aria portfolio, including VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph, deliver app-aware management to native public clouds and hybrid clouds that can empower customers to address challenges that span discipline, tools, and teams.
Today at VMware Explore, VMware is announcing the initial availability of a new free offering of VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph. This new free tier offering will enable customers to inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two of their native public cloud accounts in either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. The freemium offering will allow users to understand the relationships of their resources to other resources, policies, and other key components in their cloud environments. Additional free functionality will include visibility into CIS benchmark violation data coming from VMware Aria Automation™ for Secure Clouds as well as list price costing for resources coming from VMware Aria Cost™ powered by CloudHealth®. With the free tier, customers will be able to manually curate applications to better understand dependencies and relationships of their business applications. Initial availability of this freemium offering is expected in VMware’s Q4 FY23. VMware is also announcing the Beta availability of VMware Aria Migration™. Previously announced as Tech Preview at VMware Explore in San Francisco, VMware Aria Migration is a new end-to-end service that can leverage VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph to accelerate and simplify the multi-cloud migration journey by automating assessment, planning, and execution.
VMware Cross-Cloud™ services Helps Customers Navigate the Multi-Cloud Era
At VMware Explore 2022, VMware is unveiling new and enhanced offerings for VMware Cross-Cloud services to help customers navigate the multi-cloud era with freedom, flexibility, and security. VMware Cross-Cloud services are a portfolio of cloud services that deliver a unified and simplified way to build, operate, access, and better secure any application on any cloud from any device. VMware Cross-Cloud service pillars include 1) App Platform, 2) Cloud Management, 3) Cloud & Edge Infrastructure, 4) Security & Networking, and 5) Anywhere Workspace.