How to Modernize the Apps that Matter Most and Automate the Path to Production

Nearly 90% of enterprise CIOs and SVPs believe that improving their application portfolio is key to improving the customer experience, according to a March 2020 Forrester Consulting paper commissioned by VMware, “Improving Customer Experience And Revenue Starts With The App Portfolio.” And 82% recognize that end customer experience is tied to revenue growth.

In fact, one of the first questions CIOs ask me today is, “How do I modernize my applications and operations to get new features to my customers faster and in a secure fashion?”

That’s why I’m excited to announce the initial, core elements of the VMware Tanzu portfolio are now generally available.

With VMware, you now can modernize the applications that matter most and automate the path to production. You also can modernize your infrastructure by establishing a unified operating model for virtual machines and containers within your private cloud. Moreover, by taking full advantage of Kubernetes, VMware can help you extend that consistent operating model across clouds.

Simplify the Operation of Modern Infrastructure at Scale

Application modernization efforts will inevitably lead an organization to use containers—those immutable packages of code and dependencies that can be deployed almost anywhere. But when running containers at scale in production, things can get complex. Our own research reveals the top barrier to Kubernetes adoption in the enterprise is lack of experience and expertise.

VMware is taking that Day 1 and Day 2 Kubernetes operations burden away with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid—a complete, easy-to-upgrade Kubernetes runtime with pre-integrated and validated components. It can run consistently across your data center, public cloud and edge to offer a unified experience for all development teams.

We’re also making it easy to extend an enterprise-ready Kubernetes operating model across data centers and clouds for the 80% of enterprise workloads that are already running on VMware. We do this by integrating Tanzu Kubernetes Grid as a service in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, which is available as part of the cohesive VMware Cloud Foundation 4 stack. (Read more here about vSphere 7 with Kubernetes and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.)

With VMware, IT operators can provision Kubernetes clusters just as easily as they provision virtual machines. Developers are able to access conformant Kubernetes clusters through the native Kubernetes API. And the CIO now has the flexibility of a next-generation platform that can support both virtual machines and containers, the mixed workloads that make up modern applications.

As your Kubernetes footprint grows across multiple environments and clouds, you introduce greater challenges to applying consistent policy, security and compliance. That’s why we’re excited to announce the availability of Tanzu Mission Control as your centralized management platform for operating and securing your Kubernetes infrastructure. It provides operators a single governance control point while freeing developers to deploy to production without needing to know how to operate Kubernetes. Developers can get self-service access to clusters and namespaces across multiple public clouds—with security guardrails enforced at the infrastructure level by default.

Improve the Developer (and Operations) Experience

The transition from monolithic to microservices architectures has led to an explosion of open-source containers like MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch and Kafka. These components are often pre-packaged images with little or no transparency into what is in the stack. Nor do they always conform to IT security and auditability standards.

VMware is tackling this challenge with