Tanzu: Platform Engineering for VMware customers

One of the joys of being an IT analyst is being given a briefing by a product manager who is passionate about the product, understands why they built it, not just what they built, and can articulate the story in such a way as to make it understandable and compelling for end users and techies alike. There is nothing worse than being walked through a PowerPoint presentation by a PR or Communications person with little technical understanding.

Therefore, it was delightful to spend an hour, without a PowerPoint slide to be seen, discussing VMware Tanzu with Valentina Alaria, Senior Director Product, Tanzu Next Generation Portfolio. Valentina is knowledgeable, passionate about the product, and clearly understands the whys and wherefores of both the business and technology issues her customers and prospects face.

Tanzu started life as a means of helping enterprises integrate Kubernetes into VMware’s ecosystem, enabling organisations to adopt containerisation and microservices architectures seamlessly. Tanzu encompassed various components, including Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) for Kubernetes orchestration and Tanzu Mission Control for centralised management of Kubernetes clusters. However, the acquisition of Pivotal in August 2019, bringing access to its Cloud Foundry platform, presaged a much broader ambition. Now, VMware Tanzu has transitioned from a Kubernetes-centric offering to a comprehensive platform that addresses the broader needs of modern application development and management.

Notwithstanding the concerns generated by the changes in licensing and the significant restructuring of VMware’s partner eco-system, following its acquisition by Broadcom in 2023, I wanted to get a clearer view of how Tanzu had developed, and how the new focus on Private Cloud was informing its on-going development. Valentina immediately started talking about how they had spent time talking to hundreds of enterprise customers to understand the challenges they had, and opportunities they saw in modernising and redeveloping their existing VMware based systems.

When it comes to Information Technology, based on my 40+ years’ experience in the industry, my observation is, that for almost any technology area, businesses fall into three categories in the shape of a pyramid. At the tip, a small number of users want to do it themselves for a variety of reasons that are not all based around the size and scale of the business. At the bottom of the pyramid are a large number, usually of smaller businesses, who want vendors to do it for them. In the middle there are a sizeable number of large and medium sized businesses who, again for various reasons, want vendors to help them do it. It is this last group, and particularly those who are existing vSphere and vCloud Foundation (VCF) customers, that are the main focus for Valentina and her team.

Our discussion soon surfaced a number of key themes. The idea that Tanzu should be easy to implement, and to use, featured strongly. As Valentina put it “we had to think…how do we make Tanzu Platform ‘One click?’”. The provision of a range of best-practice templates out-of-the-box, is clearly part of that approach. But focusing on enabling the use of existing customers’ favourite development tools and languages in the platform is also important.

Given the mission critical nature of most vSphere environments, and the importance of maintaining scale and resilience as legacy applications are modernised and rearchitected for the Cloud, the scale and resiliency of the Platform is deemed to be a critical requirement. There also needs to be a brief shout out here for Tanzu including solutions for managing stateful applications and databases within Kubernetes environments, which is essential for enterprise applications that rely on persistent data storage.

So, why do I think Tanzu is Platform Engineering for VMware customers? For me, Platform Engineering has been a belated response to the fact that DevOps was not really delivering on that “shift-left” collaborative, silo-less environment implicit in the term DevOps. It seemed like it should have been written DEVops. I wish you could have seen the wonderful double-act put on by Oren Penso and DeShaun Carter at a Tanzu presentation given at VMware Explore 2024 in Barcelona back in November. (Here is a link to a YouTube video that mirrors the actual content, but is on a Zoom session between the pair of them. You’ll get the idea, but the on-stage version with a live audience benefited from the rapid repartee and being able to see their real-time reactions and expressions!). It absolutely nailed the contention at the heart of the developer/operations interface and showed how Tanzu frees up developers and makes life fast and simple for them, while providing the orchestration, management and observability features critical to operations teams. Tanzu has benefited from key integrations with Aria. Aria is a development based on the earlier vRealize solution, which scored well in my White Paper on Hybrid Infrastructure Management (a.k.a. Cloud Management) from 2019. In it I wrote, “For Enterprise users who have significant investments in VMware solutions and who are moving to the Cloud, there may be compelling reasons to use the infrastructure management and monitoring tools provided by VMware.”

In summary, VMware Tanzu has transitioned from a Kubernetes-centric offering to a comprehensive platform that addresses the broader needs of modern application development and management, solidifying its position in the enterprise cloud-native ecosystem. I am comfortable in saying that Tanzu is cloud-native in its support for Kubernetes, microservices, multi-cloud deployments, and modern development practices. However, its deep integration with VMware’s legacy infrastructure and commercial focus makes it somewhat distinct from purely open, vendor-neutral cloud-native platforms. However, if your organization prioritises leveraging existing VMware investments while modernising applications, Tanzu is an excellent fit.