New platform functions help companies to boost innovation and cost management in today's volatile financial environment
Companies need to prioritize software agility to provide resilience amid the turbulent period of the current macroeconomy. However, adoption at scale comes with several challenges due to the wide variety of clouds, tools, methodologies and skills required to accelerate and consolidate application delivery. That's why VMware (NYSE: VMW) today announced new capabilities on the VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria platforms, enabling customers to pursue an intelligent cloud strategy around the world.
As concepts of cloud-native environment and adoption of this technology increase, it is critical to invest in features that can accelerate developer productivity, drive sales and remain competitive. O Gartner predicts that, by 2025, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for over 95% of new digital initiatives.
“Across the industry, our customers are trying to juggle the diversity of tools, teams, clouds and operating models, as well as the productivity of developers and the pace of work of the operations team. This landscape calls for a new approach, focusing on a common cloud-native application platform and a multidisciplinary platform engineering team,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, general manager and senior vice president, Modern Applications and Management Business Group, VMware. “Customers need to innovate quickly while managing cost, security and performance. In response, we accelerated the release of new functionality in VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria. We are committed to helping customers drive innovation and optimization at every step of their application development and cloud management journey.”
Tanzu Application Platform 1.5 brings new capabilities that will allow organizations to build and deploy more software, faster and more securely, through an advanced set of developer tools, offering proven solutions for production, according to the needs of each company. The technology also improves end-to-end application security, streamlines platform engineering and development experiences, and extends support for leading third-party integrations. Tanzu Application Platform 1.5 also includes improved experiences for engineers and developers, more optimized deployments at scale on EKS with AWS QuickStart, increased support for Azure, out-of-the-box advanced security tools — such as automatic configuration of Transport Layer Security (TLS ) — and support for external security tools for credential management.
As part of its commitment to supporting customers during platform consolidation, VMware has also announced several updates to Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations that increase the security, freedom of choice and operational efficiency of multi-cluster and Kubernetes platform operations on any cloud. Tanzu Mission Control now supports full lifecycle control of new and existing AWS EKS clusters and the ability to modify the protection context for containers and pods, as well as allowing modification of OPA Gatekeeper policy settings on all the levels. These roles allow platform teams to take a “shift left” approach to security and ensure greater flexibility in navigating the constant changes in policy management of this nature of Kubernetes.
In addition, the company is bringing innovations to the VMware Aria platform, which include Aria Hub powered by Aria Graph; Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth and Aria Guardrails. VMware Aria solutions help cloud operations teams leverage multi-cloud functions with intelligent insights across distributed environments and provide capabilities to optimize cost, performance and security of applications and infrastructure according to business priorities. In times that call for close scrutiny of the budget, the increased governance and cost management provided by the VMware Aria portfolio is critical for business leaders focused on effectiveness and expansion.
VMware improves multi-cloud visibility with support for Google Cloud in the VMware Aria Hub free tier trial along with AWS and Azure, adds support for Kubernetes environments in the new infrastructure dashboard with service-to-service topology view, and offers VMware Aria Guardrails functions at the free tier, including landing zone policy templates and configuration drift monitoring.
To extend multi-cloud cost management, VMware Aria Cost now includes support for the Alibaba Cloud, enabling customers and partners to gain visibility into all solution values and uses on a single platform and streamline decision-making. This addition extends existing VMware Aria Cost support for containerized, data center, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and VMware Cloud on AWS (beta) environments. VMware Aria Cost is also expanding its Kubernetes reporting capabilities with the new ability to scale these environments to optimize cloud-native applications in addition to the cloud itself.
Finally, VMware continues to automate and streamline infrastructure management with complete visibility across private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Operations features a new integration with Aria Operations, a multi-cloud observability solution that enables information technology (IT) teams to gain a contextualized view of the entire Kubernetes infrastructure, applications and environments. By dispensing with the use of multiple tools, it creates a full platform awareness that allows faster troubleshooting to improve application performance.
