VMware’s Golden Path

In an era of overwhelming complexity, the golden path is a top priority for software architects.

Why? We’re moving to an application-centric world, said James Watters, senior director of R&D, Tanzu, Division, Broadcom. If there are fewer application patterns, then everyone’s life gets a bit simpler — the security person, the infrastructure person, the developer.

But what is the golden path? In VMware’s view, a golden path means making the software development process more efficient, which is a needed approach in these leaner economic times. VMware under Broadcom surveyed cloud native adoption, and the concept of the golden path emerged as one of the most critical trends, coupled with the increasing need for platform approaches. Watters joined us on The New Stack Makers to give his take on the findings from the Broadcom report: State of Cloud Native App Platforms 2024.

Watters has a story to tell about application-centric approaches. Back in 2009, Watters started talking about platforms as a service. A leader in a boisterous group, Watters helped make Cloud Foundry a reality, where it lived under VMware before eventually getting spun out with Pivotal from EMC. A senior manager at Pivotal, Watters joined VMware, helping drive VMware Tanzu, the division that put VMware into the center of the cloud native ecosystem.

With the maturity of the cloud native landscape, 55% of organizations surveyed by Vmware said they want to adopt a golden path approach, Watters said. Teams also want platforms that give them greater compliance and security out of the box, which fits with a golden path mindset.

VMware Tanzu now offers what it calls golden operations.

“And we think whether you’re consuming a Cloud Foundry platform or a Kubernetes-based platform, enterprises in order to achieve golden path-like consistency, they need a consistent way of building things, deploying them to a cluster, scaling them, adding, logging to them, etc.,” Watters said. “And we think enterprises can standardize in five or 10 commands across all their apps. And that’s something that is very central to our work on Tanzu platform today, which is that let’s take all the best practices that we’ve seen over the last decade, and make them consistent, however you want to run your apps. And I think that’s our big idea.”

Customers want a better developer experience, but how much DIY is necessary when operational consistency and security also need consideration? Watters said Tanzu can offer a platform with a choice of infrastructure but consistency of operations.

Developers started using Docker on their laptops more than a decade ago. Watters calls this the “original freedom,” which gave a taste of how the development cycle could be accelerated. It gave rise to Kubernetes and a transition to cluster demand, in which every project has its own cluster. Suddenly, the developer team had to figure out a lot for themselves.

Development might speed up, but then, it might get swamped in the DIY work.

Watters said that Tanzu has self-service built into several commands. There’s a build command, a deploy command, a scale command, a login command, and a bind to a route command. This approach has resonated with regulated organizations and those concerned about security and efficiency.

A golden path provides consistency and opinionated workflows, driving security across apps and customer interest. Apps get built inconsistently, so teams treat them independently when a bug appears. What a toil.

The Tanzu team is building an enhanced UX and platform that shows an application’s layers and any security vulnerabilities it might have so the app gets treated as part of a fleet.

What’s Next for Tanzu?

It’s a matter of integrating AI into Tanzu and seeing how it impacts user interfaces, data access across all its apps, etc. Integrating AI into every app will impact platform engineering teams for the next few years.