Broadcom’s VMware Tanzu Platform 10 Becomes a PaaS
Broadcom’s VMware Tanzu Platform 10 release this week at the VMware Explore user conference in Las Vegas represents an ambitious effort to solve a straightforward problem, one that involves a lot of difficult-to-solve engineering under the hood. The goal is to improve the developer experience while offering platform engineers more streamlined access to manage governance, compliance and security. In other words, VMware Tanzu Platform 10 is becoming a Platform as a Service (PaaS) for developers.
As the main release of Tanzu Platform since Broadcom’s acquisition, Broadcom has emphasized the importance of allowing developers to use the tools they want and how a Platform as a Service has emerged as a necessary component to that end — a key aspect of Tanzu as an application delivery platform, particularly for cloud native applications. Tanzu is now more explicitly designed in pursuit of the long sought-after “holy grail”: breaking down silos between developers, operations teams, platform engineers and other stakeholders, leading to faster release cycles, release cadences and an easier life in general for anyone involved in DevOps and CI/CD.
If Broadcom can deliver on Tanzu’s promise in November when Broadcom’s VMware Tanzu Platform 10 is expected to become available, the release can be a potential boon to developers especially, but it will still be late in the coming, Torsten Volk, an analyst at TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, said. “VMware has consolidated its vast and confusing Tanzu portfolio into one consistent platform. This is exactly what Broadcom CEO Hock Tan promised when the acquisition closed, and it is what his company delivered with Tanzu 10. In a time of heated discussions about VMware’s new pricing model and the reset of its partner ecosystem, I think it is important to acknowledge that delivering the overall Tanzu portfolio as a unified persona-driven platform is a major achievement,” Volk said.
“The actual question now is if all this came too late, as adopting any developer platform requires a lot of trust in the platform vendor when Broadcom has squandered away a massive amount of said trust and also lost a lot of its cloud native manpower,” he said.
In reality, this PaaS and platform engineering approach translates into concrete pluses for the developers and platform engineers — at least in theory. As Purnima Padmanabhan, Broadcom vice president and general manager of Tanzu Division, said during a pre-conference analyst and press briefing, application teams are often worried about their desire to commit code and want to reduce the time it takes “from my laptop to app in production.”
“As a developer, how do I make sure that as I push out these changes, my app stays resilient today? For the platform engineers and infrastructure teams, how can I make sure that I accelerate the changes — and not just for one app?”, Padmanabhan said. ”How do I make sure that I keep my infrastructure on the platform continuously fixed, keeping it available while these app changes are happening?”
Tanzu 10 Platform was designed to support multiple runtimes, including Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, offers a developer framework with polyglot support, includes a hardened set of AI services, and provides integration with over 200 open source packages, Padmanabhan said. The platform also supports application integrations, such as API gateways, ETL, data transformation systems, and databases, “ensuring that you have all the necessary components to start building and deploying your applications effectively,” Padmanabhan said.
AI Must Be Better
AI plays a significant role in this Tanzu release, thanks to the integration with Tanzu AI Solutions. While I have not yet tested it, if the claims hold true, it represents a very ambitious approach to integrating AI into the development cycle in a number of ways. Since AI is largely done in Python, Tanzu is now introducing an API to enable polyglot programming, allowing Java developers to integrate Gen AI into existing apps with VMware Spring AI. While much of GenAI development happens in Python, many enterprise applications are written in Java. Tanzu AI Solutions bridges this gap by bringing the power of GenAI to Java developers through an integrated Spring AI experience. This allows for faster GenAI development, secure model access, controlled usage, and improved accuracy and performance, Padmanabhan said.
@Broadcom‘s @VMware Cloud Foundation Division’s@cswolf keynote session at #VMwareExplore: @VMwareTanzu Platform 10 makes it ‘easy’ “to start to build and integrate AI into your applications.” pic.twitter.com/McK1oGjqIm
— BC Gain (@bcamerongain) August 27, 2024
Tanzu AI Solutions was also provided to deliver “GenAI observability” and monitoring to address accuracy and performance with analysis for apps and large language models (LLMs), Broadcom says.
As Padmanabhan explained, developers need “a simple, safe, and easy-to-use environment that allows them to move code to production efficiently. Second, the infrastructure must be dynamically provisioned and adjusted to meet the needs of the application. If the infrastructure is rigid and templated, flexibility, scale, and velocity are compromised,” Padmanabhan said.
“Finally, the application and infrastructure must be continuously updated to prevent outstanding risks,” she said. “By following these principles, we help accelerate the development, operation, and optimization of applications across both private and public clouds.
The Tanzu portfolio is straightforward, offering a core platform that supports application development, deployment, and security at scale across various environments, including VCF and public clouds, Padmanabhan said. Tanzu Data Solutions ensures that applications are connected to the necessary data services, and Tanzu Cloud Health manages costs across the environment. Additionally, Tanzu Labs provides guidance to help organizations move from code to production faster,” she said.
“With the introduction of the Tanzu Platform 10, we are offering a unified app development platform that can be deployed seamlessly across private cloud infrastructure and public cloud environments, including Kubernetes and VM runtimes,” Padmanabhan said. “The platform provides a consistent developer experience, whether working with Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes and empowers developers to build faster using tools like Spring, ensuring higher performance, governance and security.”
Development teams are “struggling tremendously to deliver AI-driven capabilities for their applications” and VMware simplifying AI development through its Tanzu platform “makes a lot of sense,” Volk said. But more work must be done. Enabling Java developers to leverage AI models and vector databases via a Python API only covers a small part of this challenge, Volk said.
“Data Scientists and the, still growing, majority of application developers ‘speak Python’ and would need Tanzu to directly support Python to a similar degree it supports Java to become excited about this platform,” Volk said. VMware needs to focus on supporting Python frameworks like Flask and Django, AI libraries like PyTorch, TensorFlow, Pandas, and NumPy, Jupyter-based notebooks, observability and monitoring for Python, service brokers, IDE plugins for Python, etc., Volk said.
A Simple PaaS
The VMware Tanzu Platform 10 released heavily involves VMware’s Cloud Foundry, which was originally created as a PaaS dating back to 2011 before VMware spun it off with EMC into Pivotal Software and then acquired Pivotal in 2019. For today’s release, a Cloud Foundry-like developer experience for Kubernetes with application spaces that introduces an application-centric layer of abstraction to allow applications to run with consistent operational governance and compliance is on offer.
The abstraction layer is designed so all stakeholders can work at once, while a so-called separation of concerns, as Broadcom calls it, remains between stakeholders. In this way, developers can focus on their applications without worrying about infrastructure details, while platform and operations teams can focus on managing infrastructure at scale, defining configurations to meet organizational governance and compliance requirements, Broadcom says.
Tanzu Platform 10 integrates with existing VMware Cloud Foundation configurations, including VMware Cloud Foundation 9 released today. “VCF 9 is a transformational platform. We reorganize ourselves internally to give you a single, unified product, one product that’s going to allow you to run a public cloud experience anywhere you do business,” Chris Wolf, global head of AI and Advanced Services, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom, said during the keynote.
