Developers Are The Future Of VMware (Part 1): Develop and Operate
With the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom anticipated to close on October 30, 2023, customers look to VMware Explore 2023 in Las Vegas to see if VMware is the right horse to bet on for their application transformation and cloud native app strategy.
Can the virtualization pioneers make the leap from an infrastructure-centric company that also does apps (and still needs to support approximately 500,000 virtualization customers), to a vendor of cloud native developer experiences that provides management, automation, and orchestration of the underlying infrastructure? And can they do it under the roof of Broadcom, a silicon and infrastructure vendor, that has the goal of growing its software chops?
[You can jump to part 2 of this article: Multi-Cloud and AI]
Priorities: Data, Security, Application, and AI
The official conference agenda shows that VMware knows exactly what they need to do to transform into a vendor of cloud native platforms. Data, security, application, and AI are at the top of my chart that is based on a full text analysis of the complete conference agenda. Network and compute, as the classic infrastructure topics, are near the bottom of this chart.
Looking at the products that appear at the top of the conference agenda, we find the spring application framework, the Aria multi-cloud management, and of course the Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) at the top of the chart. This shows that VMware has understood the importance of positioning itself as the vendor that enables clients to release software more frequently, faster, and more economically.
GPT-4 Confirms The Analysis
But don’t believe me, believe GPT-4 summarizing the titles and summary contents of all 411 sessions from VMware Explore 2023 in Las Vegas (question: “can you summarize the key themes of the VMware explore sessions without focusing on any individual session.”)
Unedited Summary by GPT-4 Based On Session Agenda
Generative AI and Multi-Cloud Convergence: The event discussions mainly revolve around the role of generative AI and multi-cloud systems in shaping business innovations. There is a focus on delivering more secure and efficient enterprise AI models and harnessing the benefits of AI and multi-cloud in the competitive business landscape.
Application Delivery and Innovation: The keynotes emphasized the importance of accelerating application delivery for continuous innovation. This comes with the challenge of delivering applications at scale across multiple cloud environments.
Edge Computing with VMware: Sessions revolve around understanding the role of edge computing and how it can be utilized effectively with VMware’s solutions. Operations in distributed enterprises and edge locations are covered in this context.
Data and Intelligence for Modern Workspace: There is a focus on connection of data and intelligence to power the modern workspace. The latest VMware Anywhere Workspace innovations were unveiled to support this theme.
Enhancing Enterprise Cloud Transformation: There is an emphasis on the need to innovate and accelerate enterprise cloud transformation. This takes into account the challenges brought about by implementing multi-cloud technologies, especially in terms of cost and complexity.
Role of Community and Interactive Experiences: The significance of community-led panel discussions and inclusion of interactive experiences, such as art infusion into product experiences and small focus groups, are essential thematic elements.
Platform and Tools Innovations: Discussions also touched on accelerating innovation with Spring, utilizing AI tools for improving engineering throughput, and innovations in VMware products like vSphere to aid cloud transformation.
Partnerships and Collaborations: Various sessions discuss VMware’s collaborations with partners and other tech giants like Microsoft, with a focus on how these collaborations can be mutually beneficial.
This shows that VMware’s vision is dead-on.
Same Story on Twitter and LinkedIn
Hashtags focused on application frameworks, multi-cloud operations, and AI also dominate the Twitter conversation and VMware Explore related posts on LinkedIn (see following 2 charts).
Consolidate and Simplify
Finding dozens of Kubernetes clusters, hundreds of public cloud accounts, 10–20 observability tools, a few dozen CI/CD pipelines, lots of independent infrastructure-as-code deployments and automation platforms, many different operating systems, and any number of other heterogeneous elements, is what we have come to expect. Adopting infrastructure-, platform-, and application-services specific to AWS, Azure, and GCP has created additional technology silos.
VMware proposes one platform to develop, operate, and optimize applications independently of the underlying infrastructure that could be located in a traditional corporate data center, a hosted private cloud, a public cloud, or at edge cloud locations. VMware wants to deliver a unified set of developer APIs and universally managed application runtimes, both of which are centrally governed and continuously enhanced.
Tanzu Application Platform: You Built It, You Own It
Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) wants to offer a unified developer experience independently of development framework, DevOps toolchain, application runtime, and Kubernetes cluster. This is where Backstage comes in.
Backstage: The Key To Scalability
The Backstage open-source developer platform provides developers with the tools, insights, and integrations they need to truly own their services, but without turning into Kubernetes cluster admins, DevOps engineers, or SREs. This is the key to scalability for the development and operation of cloud native apps, services, and machine learning models.
In a nutshell, Backstage provides the following key components that constitute the foundation for VMware Application Platform:
- Software Catalog for Service Discovery: In addition to service discovery, the software catalog is the basis for an automatically updated universal API layer. This ensure that all APIs can be scanned for compliance and security vulnerabilities and easily reused by neighboring app development teams.
- Repository for Documentation: Universal document repository that includes a universal search engine that works across the entire enterprise.
- Application Templates: Application templates are key, as they enable the integration of TAP with any kind of infrastructure, platform, or application service that is currently in use. This inlcudes Azure DevOps, Azure Kubernetes Services, Google Kubernetes Engine, Amazon EC2 Kubernetes Services (EKS), GitHub, BitBucket, Jenkins, Kafka, Dynatrace, New Relic, and basically any other popular DevOps tools (complete list). Additionally, Backstage comes with an SDK for the easy development of additional integrations. For TAP, VMware has added a new configurator tool, the ability to use Backstage integrations, single sign on (SSO) for apps, and enhanced handling of locally stored container images. VMware has also added on a number of security features such as ‘bring your own scanner’, triaging CVEs, tracking and storing a software bill of materials (SBOM) for every build, and enhanced GitOps capabilities, such as automated builds based on upstream code changes.
Tanzu Application Engine (Tech Preview)
Developers can deploy infrastructure-independent app profiles defined by platform engineers and operated by corporate IT. This brings us a lot closer to the vision of coding once and deploying anywhere, as application profiles are managed separately from infrastructure clusters. It also means that platform engineers and operators do not need to harass developers when troubleshooting or upgrading application infrastructure.
In part 2 of this article, I will take a look at the optimize-capabilities of Tanzu Intelligence Services and at Tanzu Hub (VMware’s take on Infrastructure-as-Code).
