VMware’s Tanzu Advanced Extends Across All Security Layers on Kubernetes

VMware has expanded its VMware Tanzu Advanced Kubernetes distribution to embrace all the security layers for DevSecOps teams, with the goal of helping organizations deliver applications to production faster..

By including the recent release of vSphere for Tanzu, Tanzu Advanced is designed to help organizations better manage the challenges of choosing and adding various topologies to Kubernetes deployments. Tanzu Advanced was thus created to enable enterprises to better integrate DevSecOps by addressing needs across the container lifecycle, VMware says.

“Modernizing applications is complex for many organizations. VMware Tanzu Advanced simplifies and secures the container lifecycle, enabling teams to accelerate the delivery of modern applications across multiple clouds: a real DevSecOps approach,” James Watters, chief technology officer of VMware’s modern application platforms business unit at VMware, told The New Stack. “Tanzu Advanced enables teams to align in a shared effort to modernize applications by addressing needs across the container lifecycle, specifically: developer velocity, security and operator efficiency.”

Tanzu Advanced thus “subsumes the capabilities of Tanzu Standard,”  in order to “add full networking accompaniment,” including the developer experience with Spring, Build Service, Application Catalog and SQL, Watters said. The top of the Advanced stack is “the global control plane of full policy management, observability and service mesh,” Watters said.

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Tanzu Advanced’s main capabilities include:

• Developer velocity tools: “Tanzu Advanced enables developers to spend more time coding by automating container sourcing and builds as well as providing self-service access to environments,” Watters said. “Now, developers don’t need to be infrastructure experts and can instead focus on innovating.”
• End-to-end security tools: “Tanzu Advanced boosts an organization’s security posture with source code provenance, automated updates and scanning, consistent policy and access control across all clusters, as well as secure connectivity between services,” Watters said.
• End-to-End Management Tools: “Tanzu Advanced simplifies how operators centrally manage Kubernetes clusters at scale across teams and clouds, and give them full observability into the health and performance of clusters across clouds,” Watters said.

Ultimately, the idea is for Tanzu Advanced to add security protection across applications and containers’ life cycles that also help to standardize DevSecOps practices for organizations’ DevOps teams.

“In our conversations with customers, organizations building custom or container-based applications need expanded capabilities,” Watters said. “For example, if a customer is trying to build DevOps practices, they’ll want to streamline how developers use containers and microservices and make security part of software development — taking on a real DevSecOps approach. “

The Tanzu Reach

As mentioned above, Tanzu Advanced offers a DevSecOps framework for Tanzu Standard. Tanzu Standard provides DevOps teams, among other things: Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and its open source attachments (a subset of Tanzu Mission Control capabilities) and networking components of Contour for Ingress and container networking.

Watters also described how Tanzu was contributed to allow organizations to manage and deploy applications “atop the data center infrastructure and DevSecOps platform. “To support more frequent changes, these applications need to follow modern application patterns, such as microservices architectures and API-first design,” which Watters said includes,” Watters said.

The introduction of Project Iris will allow DevOps teams to “discover and analyze organizations’ full app portfolio,” while also automating recommendations for apps to rehost, replatform, or refactor and enabling “customers to adapt their own transformation,” Watters said.

For additional support for “apps that need more refactoring,” VMware Tanzu Labs — which was previously VMware Pivotal Labs (VMware acquired Pivotal Labs in 2019) — will help to introduce cloud native “patterns and practices that enable DevSecOps, as well as help them design, implement and configure the platform that’s right for their organization,” Watters said.