VMware enhances VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria Platforms

Today’s businesses must prioritize software agility to enable resilience amidst turbulent macroeconomic times. But adoption at scale is challenging given the different clouds, tools, methodologies, and skills needed to successfully accelerate and mature application delivery. As cloud native concepts and adoption grows, it’s essential to invest in capabilities that accelerate developer productivity, drive revenue, and stay competitive. VMware has announced new capabilities across the VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria platforms to empower customers with the capabilities to take a cloud-smart approach to modern application delivery across any cloud.

“Our customers across the enterprise are engaged in a cumbersome balancing act -- juggling multiple tools, teams, clouds, and operating models while at the same time keeping developers productive and the operations team equipped to keep pace. This scenario demands a new approach around a common cloud native app platform and a multi-disciplinary platform engineering team,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, General Manager and SVP, Modern Applications and Management Business Group, VMware. “Customers tell us they need to rapidly innovate while at the same time manage cost, security, and performance. In response, we expedited the launch of new capabilities across VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria. We are committed to helping customers drive innovation and optimization every step of the app development and cloud management journey.”

Tanzu Application Platform 1.5, with new capabilities will enable companies to build and deploy more software, more quickly and securely, through a rich set of developer tooling. It offers pre-paved, more secure golden paths to production customized to their business. The Tanzu Application Platform 1.5 release  enhances end-to-end app security, streamlines developer and platform engineering experiences, and expands support for leading third-party integrations, including improved developer and platform engineering experiences, more streamlined deployments at scale on EKS with AWS QuickStart, expanded Azure support, out of-the-box and expanded customer choice of security tools like auto-configuration of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and support for external security tools for secrets management.

As part of its commitment to supporting customers at every stage of Kubernetes platform maturity, VMware also announced several updates to Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations that aim to increase security, choice and operational efficiency of multi-cluster and multi-Kubernetes platform operations across any cloud. Tanzu Mission Control now supports full lifecycle management of new and existing AWS EKS clusters, the ability to mutate the security context for containers and pods and allows the modification of OPA Gatekeeper policy settings at all levels such as organization, cluster group, and cluster. These capabilities enable platform teams to adopt a ‘shift-left’ approach to security and greater flexibility to navigate the ever-changing world of Kubernetes security policy management.

Additionally, the company is introducing innovations across the VMware Aria platform including Aria Hub powered by Aria Graph, Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, and Aria Guardrails. VMware Aria solutions help cloud operations teams to harness multi-cloud capabilities with intelligent insights into distributed environments, and provide the capabilities that enable optimized cost, performance, and security of applications and infrastructure aligned to business priorities. In times of increased budget scrutiny, the increased governance, security, and cost management that the VMware Aria portfolio provides is vital for business leaders focused on efficiency and scale.

VMware improves multi-cloud visibility with the addition of Google Cloud support in VMware Aria Hub Free Tier alongside AWS and Azure, adds support for Kubernetes environments with a new infrastructure dashboard with service-to-service topology view, and adds VMware Aria Guardrails capabilities, including landing zones policies templates and config drift management, to the Free Tier.

For expanded multi-cloud cost management, VMware Aria Cost now includes support for Alibaba Cloud, enabling customers and partners to gain visibility into all Alibaba Cloud costs and usage in a single platform and streamline decision-making. The addition of Alibaba Cloud expands existing VMware Aria Cost support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, VMware Cloud on AWS (beta), data center, and containerized environments. VMware Aria Cost is also expanding its Kubernetes reporting capabilities by introducing the ability to right-size Kubernetes environments to optimize cloud-native application environments in addition to the cloud.

Lastly, VMware continues to automate and streamline cloud infrastructure management with full-stack visibility across private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Operations introduces a new integration with Aria Observability (a multi-cloud observability solution) to enable IT teams to gain contextualized visibility across their infrastructure, Kubernetes environments and applications with the aim to eliminate the need for disparate tools to effectively manage multi-clouds and provides a holistic platform view enabling faster troubleshooting and reducing mean-time-to-resolution to improve application performance.