VMware beefs up Tanzu portfolio, adds OpenShift support

VMware is making significant enhancements to its Tanzu Application Platform (TAP), in a bid to improve productivity and simplify DevSecOps processes for developers of containerised applications.

With Tanzu Application Platform 1.3, VMware is not only investing in open source technology such as Backstage, a tool for building developer portals, it is also helping developers to streamline pipelines with support for additional Kubernetes deployment platforms.

More notably, TAP 1.3 will include support for Red Hat OpenShift, which VMware officials said has been more focused on supporting operators in terms of delivering the runtime and manageability of Kubernetes clusters and policies.

“What’s been missing in the market, and from our experience with having built Pivotal Cloud Foundry, is a simplified developer experience,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice-president and general manager at VMware’s modern apps and management business group.

“What TAP provides is the Backstage-based graphical user interface with a set of accelerators and shared pipelines that can be customised and targeted for any Kubernetes platform.

“We’ve been really focused on that developer experience and secure software supply chain pieces that complement any Kubernetes deployment, whether it’s OpenShift, EKS [Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service], AKS [Azure Kubernetes Service] or even our own Tanzu Kubernetes runtime,” said Patel.

As for security, TAP 1.3 will support air gap installations for organisations that operate in highly regulated industries and disconnected environments. “The ‘Sec’ part of DevSecOps has become a central point for many of our customers, whether it’s Log4j or other risks that we see every day,” he said. “Vulnerability scanning and many of the enhancements around software bill of materials [SBOM] have been critical.”

To that, VMware is adding support to the CycloneDX and SPDX standards for communicating SBOM information, as well as vulnerability scanning tools such as VMware Carbon Black scanner in addition to Snyk and Grype.

Alongside enhancements in TAP are updates to the Tanzu Application Service – previously Pivotal Cloud Foundry – which Patel said has had significant scale and continues to grow over 20% year-on-year in the number of workloads.

He added that VMware is lining up multi-year support for TAS as it becomes mainstream and will be adding a TAS adapter later this year to deliver Cloud Foundry’s cf push experience on top of the Tanzu platform built on Kubernetes. “This provides a consistent developer experience across both our TAS and TAP platforms,” said Patel.