DEVOPSdigest

Broadcom announced VMware Tanzu Platform 10, a cloud native application platform that accelerates software delivery, providing platform engineering teams enhanced governance and operational efficiency while reducing toil and complexity for development teams.

The company also introduced Tanzu AI Solutions, a set of capabilities within Tanzu Platform that help application teams deliver GenAI-powered, intelligent applications quickly, safely, and at scale. Tanzu Platform 10 and VMware Cloud Foundation now provide the fastest path to a complete private cloud with a self-configuring setup experience and support for air-gapped environments.

“Business leaders want to harness the power of GenAI in their application strategy, but in many cases, they face complex challenges with this emerging technology, leading teams to create one-off experiments and silos that only add technical debt and risk,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, general manager, Tanzu Division, Broadcom. “Now, with Tanzu Platform’s built-in AI development framework, developers can build high-performing, intelligent apps, regardless of their experience level or knowledge of Python. Tanzu AI Solutions help development teams go from dabbling in the sandbox to deploying enterprise-ready intelligent applications to production with confidence.”

Tanzu Platform 10 builds on Cloud Foundry’s approach to accelerating application delivery with standardized golden paths to production for developers and platform engineers. Now developers can use simple operations to automate secure container builds, bind services to apps, deploy code with a single command, and easily scale applications. Tanzu Platform 10 also automates both application and platform management tasks such as patching vulnerabilities, performing rolling upgrades, and enforcing policies with broad visibility and AI-powered insights.

Tanzu Platform 10 delivers a self-managed, global control plane for greater automation and visibility across all application environments. Tanzu Platform 10 also features:

- A Cloud-Foundry-like developer experience for Kubernetes with application spaces that introduces an application-centric layer of abstraction to allow applications to run with consistent operational governance and compliance. The abstraction model will create a clean separation of concerns between stakeholders: developers can focus on their applications without worrying about infrastructure details; while platform and operations teams can focus on managing infrastructure at scale, defining configurations to meet organizational governance and compliance requirements.

- Enhanced contextual app-to-platform visibility across Cloud Foundry foundations or Kubernetes clusters across availability zones.

- Powerful 'built-in' service binding to connect apps to middleware and databases, and automatically manage credentials and connection strings bringing huge time savings

- Spring application security, compliance audits, policy enforcement, and automated CVE remediation with new Application Advisor.

- Significantly faster start-up times for Spring applications with enhanced Java buildpacks in Tanzu Spring, commercial Spring features built into Tanzu Platform.

- Elevated compliance enforcement and vulnerability management with Tanzu Salt.

- Auto-provisioned and hardened OSS databases and messaging.

Tanzu Platform 10 provides powerful, ready-to-deploy advanced services for VMware Cloud Foundation, including container operations and data services, for the fastest path to a complete private cloud. To accelerate the delivery of modern applications on private cloud, Tanzu Platform 10 provides the following new capabilities:

- Air-gapped environment support for off-network, self-managed, private cloud environments with a simple, self-configuring installation experience that preconfigures Tanzu Platform for VMware Cloud Foundation. With a simple CLI command, Kubernetes cluster creation and networking configuration are automated, creating a ready-to-consume private cloud developer platform.

- Global Server Load Balancing and Advanced Networking for Tanzu Platform brings new enhancements to private clouds using the VMware Avi Load Balancer, with pre-configured support in Cloud Foundry deployments for managing routing, and source-to-url dynamic networking using load balancing and dynamic DNS for Kubernetes environments.

- Hardened VM and OSS images available through the Tanzu Application Catalog are now integrated directly into Tanzu Platform hub, enabling hardened VM and OSS images to be deployed with Tanzu Platform. This enables IT operations teams to ensure that only validated, secure packaged images are deployed within their private cloud estate. This integration also brings continuous vulnerability scanning of VM and OSS images to ensure customers are running secure workloads.

Tanzu Platform democratizes intelligent application development. Tanzu Platform now includes Tanzu AI Solutions, a set of capabilities that help customers develop, operate, and optimize AI-powered, intelligent applications safely, and at scale. Tanzu AI Solutions also delivers GenAI observability and monitoring to address accuracy and performance with root cause analysis for apps and large language models (LLMs). Tanzu AI Solutions includes:

- Spring AI is an open source application framework that can be used by Java developers to build GenAI-powered features into applications. Spring AI offers developer-friendly Java APIs that can be used to access LLM models and implement higher level AI and application logic patterns. With Spring AI, Java developers can seamlessly integrate GenAI capabilities into their new or existing applications without needing to cross-train in Python.

- GenAI on Tanzu Platform is an enhanced OpenAI compatible API gateway available in Tanzu Platform which has built-in API abstraction as well as load balancing, resilience, and caching. It allows you to run or connect to 100-plus proprietary or OSS LLMs in a secure and consistent manner. Tanzu Platform brokers LLM services as with any other services like databases and enterprise APIs, allowing platform engineering to curate AI services with role-based access controls and automate secrets management away from the developer for security and resilience.

- Observability for GenAI provides increased performance and accuracy with monitoring and assessment of apps and model responses. This capability helps teams visualize, test and troubleshoot AI apps by performing model accuracy checks, and scans for hallucinations. It also monitors token usage to more easily control the costs of LLM calls.

- Support for VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA is built-in to the GenAI on Tanzu Platform service broker as ready-to-curate, drop-down selections to be made available to application teams.