Broadcom Debuts VMware Tanzu Platform 10 at Explore 2024

For the opening of the VMware Explore user conference in Las Vegas this week, Broadcom has updated the VMware Tanzu platform.

The enhancements are designed to simplify the developer experience while increasing the application development velocity, said Purnima Padmanabhan, Broadcom vice president and general manager of Tanzu Division, in a press briefing last week.

“App velocity is equivalent to business velocity. When you need to respond to a market change, market condition, you make a change to your application, and then you get it out to the market,” Padmanabhan said. “And the distinction between high performers and low performers is spectacular.”

Tanzu is Broadcom’s commercially supported runtime for Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, providing a platform engineering-based environment for developers.

Tanzu Platform 10 integrates with the public cloud (by way of virtual machines), Kubernetes and VMware Cloud Foundation, which is VMware’s architecture for setting up software-defined data centers. It can run both stateless, stateful (data-driven) and polyglot (multi-language) applications.

“Tanzu platform 10 truly gives you that singular, simple developer experience, irrespective of the underlying platform,” she said.

App Velocity: What Does It Mean?

For developers to build apps quickly requires three things, Padmanabhan said.

The developer experience must be simple. They should be able to provision infrastructure on the flow (and shouldn’t be hampered by clunky templates).

And, lastly, the apps must be continuously updated, not only to add new features but also to guard against emerging security threats.

Think hours or days, rather than weeks or months as a timeframe for updating an app.

“Sometimes, doing things faster actually gets you to better outcomes,” Padmanabhan said.

Tanzu has been refined to help developers hit these marks, Padmanabhan said. It builds on Cloud Foundry’s open source platform-as-a-service to provide an application-centric layer to developers, built on a global control plane. Devs can assemble apps in containers with service bindings combined with their own code. The platform itself handles the tasks of patching vulnerabilities, upgrading, and enforcing policies.

👁 Slide on the new features of Tanzu 10.

New Features for Tanzu 10

For this release, the software has been more tightly integrated with Spring, a Java-based framework for application development (which VMware acquired with its 2019 purchase of Pivotal). This will help enterprises, who largely rely on Java, stand up their AI-enhanced applications more quickly, Padmanabhan said.

Version 10 of Tanzu comes with Tanzu AI Solutions, a set of tools that will allow devs to add AI capabilities within their apps, including:

• Java-based APIs to access LLM models and associated application logic patterns, via the Spring framework (eliminating the need to learn Python in many cases).
• An OpenAI-compatible API gateway to act as a broker for hundreds of LLMs, with built-in ad balancing, resilience, and caching. This provides a way for developers top create AI services with appropriate security controls for users.
• An observability toolkit for testing and troubleshooting AI apps for potential problems such as hallucinations or potential security issues.

This version has been integrated with more than 200 open source packages that can be easily deployed and configured by developers, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, and Hazelcast.

“So what you have is a subsystem that truly gives you all the pieces to start building your applications and deploying them at scale and speed,” she said.

Other new capabilities include:

• Air-gapped environment support for off-network, self-managed, private cloud environments.
• Global Server Load Balancing and Advanced Networking via the VMware Avi Load Balancer.
• Hardened VM and OSS images for organizations that require validated, secure packaged images.

Tanzu Data Solutions

In addition to the Tanzu updates, Padmanabhan also offered an update on Tanzu Data Solutions, which can provide the data needed for apps built on Tanzu. The platform now incorporates the GemFire in-memory cache, Greenplum geospatial analytics, RabbitMQ extended connectivity, and encryption for the PostgreSQL relational database.