As the new wave of cloud and artificial intelligence takes hold, digital products are evolving to become more complex and expansive. In response, the application platforms powering those products are experiencing similar growth.
One of those is VMware Tanzu, which has been fortified to accelerate enterprise app delivery.
Unpacking the new Tanzu with Broadcom’s James Watters and Purnima Padmanabhan.
“Tanzu was almost synonymous with Kubernetes in the past,” said Purnima Padmanabhan (pictured, left), vice president and general manager of the Tanzu Division at Broadcom Inc. “Tanzu has evolved [into] an application platform. It is an application platform that sits on top of any IaaS and allows customers to accelerate their application delivery. The nice thing about the Tanzu platform is it’s paired with tons of data. No application lives on an island, and that is the true portfolio. Now this platform may run on Cloud Foundry VMs and Kubernetes on public cloud or private cloud.”
Padmanabhan and James Watters (right), senior director of R&D, Tanzu Division, at Broadcom, spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier during a CUBE Conversation at SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio in Palo Alto. They discussed Tanzu as an application platform for companies navigating the complexities of distributed computing. (* Disclosure below.)
Application platform: Key Tanzu developments
Tanzu’s several additions have resulted in a robust application platform atop any infrastructure-as-a-service environment. From there, users can develop, operate and optimize applications at scale. This versatility is coupled with a wealth of data integration, ensuring that no application operates in isolation and providing a comprehensive portfolio for users.
“The big thing we did in May is we launched our Tansu platform,” Padmanabhan said. “It is a consistent SKU to the market that is unified so that it is not a bag of parts that people are assembling together to create that platform. It’s also a consistent product release that we did. We didn’t raise prices when we launched this SKU. The prices stayed the same. More importantly, we have added a lot more to the platform.”
Building on the revamped product blueprint, Tanzu introduced the “golden operations” concept for enterprise app development. It simplifies the developer experience by abstracting infrastructure complexity and automating infrastructure provisioning based on developer intent. Key tenets include ensuring a safe and simple developer experience, automatic translation of developer intent into dynamic infrastructure provisioning, and continuous updates to infrastructure and applications to maintain security and compliance, according to Padmanabhan.
“The developer doesn’t have to worry, ‘Shall I push the code, will I break something?’ So, all of that adds not only more power for the developer, but more speed, which is what is needed now with these new generation applications with AI,” she said. “But it also makes sure it keeps the corporate principles of security and governance together.”
Speed, execution and scale: Simplifying DevOps across the board
Tanzu aims to make the developer experience straightforward and efficient. By minimizing the need for developers to manage YAML and infrastructure configurations, Tanzu provides a streamlined set of operations: build, bind, deploy and scale. This simplicity allows developers to focus on writing code and integrating external services without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
On the executive side, today’s development pace with gen AI emphasizes the fast, scalable execution of digital strategies. Tanzu addresses these needs by providing a platform that allows organizations to rapidly develop and deploy intelligent applications, according to Watters. Executives are increasingly focused on delivering intelligent applications quickly and efficiently, and Tanzu’s platform engineering approach meets this demand by reducing the cycle time for developers and ensuring consistent, operable experiences.
“The current market forces are really making execs ask two big questions,” Watters said. “One is, ‘How do I deliver intelligent applications faster?’ And I’m talking weeks now, not years, because no one has time for that. We’re seeing an age of efficiency and security, and I think these common operations have allowed us to introduce a standardized way that some of those DevOps tasks had done — and to reduce the cycle time for developers to get code to production, but also just as importantly to really make it a consistent operable experience.
Organizations using Tanzu have reported significant improvements in operational efficiency and speed. For example, financial services firms are using Tanzu to enhance their trading applications with AI-driven features, ensuring real-time fraud detection and other critical functions. By providing a unified platform that integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructures, Tanzu helps businesses avoid the pitfalls of DIY solutions and focus on innovation and growth, according to Padmanabhan.
“How people trade, how people search for things has suddenly changed,” she said. “You can’t be waiting. You have to put your application out. Do you focus on building the business logic? The AI, the models, the inferences. Or do you spend most of your time thinking about how to set up the infrastructure, platform and DevOps?”
Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Padmanabhan and Watters:
(* Disclosure: VMware by Broadcom sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware by Broadcom nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)