As part of VMware's “north star” mission to accelerate application delivery, the vendor is integrating its Tanzu Kubernetes and Aria multicloud management portfolios to help organizations develop modern applications faster, operate them at scale and continuously optimize. “To do these three things, I need all components of Aria and Tanzu,” VMware GM and SVP of Modern Apps Purnima Padmanabhan told SDxCentral.

VMware's slew of updates to its modern applications portfolio include the general availability of Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) 1.5 and new capabilities for its Aria multicloud management suite, including Aria Guardrails and an environmental, social and governance (ESG) dashboard. These updates tie together the two portfolios and support the vendor's application-focused goal of accelerating the development, operation and optimization of the application lifecycle, Padmanabhan said.

VMware TAP 1.5 creates 'golden path to production'

The Tanzu portfolio – named after the Japanese term for portable container – was first introduced in late 2021 as “the future of VMware,” former SVP Ajay Patel told SDxCentral at the time.

Building on the TAP 1.4 update earlier this year, 1.5 introduces an application accelerator tool that offers predefined templates that free application developers from needing to understand “a gobbledygook of technologies,” according to Padmanabhan, who took over for Patel at the beginning of this year. Developers can focus on building and checking the code, and “TAP takes care of everything else. That is what's called golden path to production,” she said.

Efforts are currently “underway to take that application and connect it into Aria Hub and Graph,” she added.

VMware also introduced Tanzu Kubernetes Operations, which allows IT teams to operate Kubernetes environments at scale.

“With Kubernetes, the problem is that sometimes success makes it harder,” Padmanabhan said. In environments with a large number of clusters, it's harder to manage the policies for those clusters, virtual private clouds and other services. “That is what we are bringing together in Tanzu Kubernetes Operations – better lifecycle management of Kubernetes environments without impacting the application,” she explained.

VMware Aria adds Tanzu interoperability

The VMware Aria platform, which launched during VMware Explore 2022, is powered by graph-based data store technology and focused on several categories of multicloud management: cost, operations, automation, policy enforcement and application migration. These are anchored by the vendor’s Aria Hub where enterprises can centrally view and control multicloud environments.

The vendor's updates include the general availability of Aria Hub and Graph and an extension of the platform to the Aria and Tanzu portfolios. This extension gives developers a constant and single view of their applications and infrastructure dependencies associated with development, testing, operating at scale and optimizing, Padmanabhan explained.

A major selling point of this integration is interoperability with VMware's Tanzu Kubernetes portfolio. And while the Aria's capabilities on their own are “not unique to Aria, by bringing those together, now, when I'm using a Tanzu portfolio product I can actually plug it into Aria Hub and Graph to get the data [and] information about my application,” she added.

Aria guards policies, supports cloud migration

VMware Aria Guardrails is now generally available on top of Aria Hub, and it's in beta testing with customers who have shared “great feedback,” Padmanabhan noted.

“With Aria, I know the near-real-time state of the config of the environment. With Guardrails, I can create a desired landing zone on any environment – Kubernetes, containers or cloud – and continuously keep it under policy,” she explained. Within Aria Guardrails, the vendor's graph technology “is constantly checking what changed” in all environments. And if those changes contradict a set policy, it applies guardrails targeted at cost, performance or security.

The vendor also introduced its Aria Migration offering, which is targeted at enterprises accelerating application delivery and existing applications.

Padmanabhan cited customers that run millions of transactions through their application, and “every time something goes wrong, it takes a long time to debug.” Those customers tend to modernize their application by moving it to a cloud or colocation provider, but “migration is a hard problem because most of the people don't understand what their app is,” she said.

By plugging an application into Aria Hub and Graph, enterprises can perform a brownfield discovery, understand the boundary of their application and plan out a migration. “You can figure out what is the cost to migrate it. You can figure out what are the right set of services you need to migrate,” she added.

VMware also added Kubernetes cost management capabilities to Aria Cost and expanded the geographic availability of Aria Automation. “We are really upping the ante and with lots of customer success on these multi cloud deployments. We have now tons of customers who are using automation to provision both on-prem and VMware Cloud, but also to multicloud” environments, she said.

VMware Aria ESG dashboard pitches sustainability benefits to C-suites

The updated Aria multicloud management suite also includes an ESG dashboard to address the increasing connections between environmental impact and shareholder investments and help teams better communicate about ESG to executive leaders.

“One of the big things that we're doing as part of Aria Operations is a green score,” Padmanabhan said. “There are two ways in which you optimize cost, but it's not just about cost. Some companies are presenting these ESG scores because even things like investment in their stock depends on how well they do ESG,” she added. To that point, Aria Operations is designed to optimize underutilized and orphan servers to save power, along with automatic workload resizing capabilities.

But it can be difficult for executives to translate something like automatic resizing into ESG impacts. “We have created specific dashboards baked into Aria that tell you what your ESG score looks like” by equating carbon emissions to trees or cars on the road. This “fundamental concept” is something she has seen customers gravitate toward and use to communicate the importance of ESG and progress on initiatives.