VMware bolstered its Kubernetes-based Tanzu service with new features that further highlight the vendor's cloud-native journey and increasing reliance on the Tanzu platform.

“Tanzu is the future of VMware,” Ajay Patel, SVP and GM of the vendor's modern application platform business, told SDxCentral in an interview tied to this week's VMworld 2021 event.

Patel did add that Tanzu's success does not discount VMware’s legacy strength as an infrastructure provider. He explained that although the Tanzu Application Platform runs most effectively on VMware, it “should run great on any Kubernetes” platform. And to that point, he added VMware is “definitely teasing [Tanzu] apart” from VMware more broadly. 

The reality is customers are unlikely to put all their eggs in VMware’s basket. In that case, Patel acknowledged “we need to make sure we can adapt and make it easy for customers to build that modular platform and drive the outcomes they want.”

Patel's broader Tanzu excitement echoed recent comments from VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram.

“Tanzu is a very fundamental part of our portfolio. And it’s a very exciting part of the portfolio,” Raghuram said during a press conference last month. “The growth opportunity for Tanzu is just the growth opportunity for applications as a whole — it’s massive.”

At this week’s event, the vendor announced the phase-two beta of the Tanzu Application Platform, which was initially released during the vendor’s SpringOne conference last month. 

“It's really about making it easier for developers to build applications on Kubernetes instead of having to dig through and write lines and lines and lines in order to configure their application,” Dormain Drewitz, Senior Director of Product Marketing at VMware, said during a VMworld pre-briefing. A “clean starting point” such as the vendor’s Tanzu platform addresses this issue, Drewitz explained.

Supply chain choreography is one of the new features. “This is an essential part of a platform that helps take code all the way through those stages and steps until it's ready to be deployed in production,” Drewitz said. 

Other updates include security capability features for signing, scanning, and storing images during production; service bindings; developer tooling like integrated development environment plugins; source controllers; and convention services. 

VMware earlier this week released its free Tanzu Community Edition option as a full-feature version of its managed Kubernetes platform. It's targeted toward small-scale and pre-production environments, with the software free to download and run without any feature or usage limitations. 

“[Kubernetes] is something that a lot of folks really learn by doing,” Drewitz said. “[Tanzu Community Edition] is about giving people that no-cost entry point to get started.”

Tanzu Community Edition uses the same open-source software that is “at the core” of VMware’s commercial Tanzu services, Drewitz said.  This means developers of varying skill levels can get their feet wet with Kubernetes, “whether it's just for their own learning or they're trying to get started in [a] frictionless way” before transitioning to a commercial Tanzu platform, Drewtiz said. “They want to be able to touch things, try it out, [and] play with it,” she added.

VMware this week also announced a free version of its Tanzu Mission Control, which provides lifecycle management on any Kubernetes service. The new tier, Tanzu Mission Control Starter, can be combined with Tanzu Community Edition to allow developers to run and manage containerized apps on Kubernetes at no cost.