VMware is chugging along on its work to be the agnostic figure of Kubernetes orchestration, rolling out the latest 1.4 release of its Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) that VMware Tanzu SVP Edward Hieatt said is "sort of [the] magic behind the scenes from the developer point of view."

The Tanzu portfolio – named after the Japanese term for portable container – was first introduced in late 2021 as "the future of VMware,” SVP Ajay Patel told SDxCentral at the time. The newest TAP release focuses on limiting developer toil while enhancing the platform's security capabilities.

The developer experience improvements aim to build a space for devs to "just write their code and push a button," Hieatt said in an exclusive interview with SDxCentral. "There's been a lot of work done in this release on the experience in IDE [integrated development environment] and particularly IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code – things like provisioning Git repositories when creating a project with TAP and generating the code for which you can even push to provision repository," he explained.

Hieatt touted the platform's API lifecycle improvements and single sign-on (SSO) connected to lightweight directory access protocols as the "hooks into the enterprise world that we're focused on." This leaves development teams to "just write code" without worrying about integrations, he said.

The security side of the platform updates are structured to be "good for the enterprise" and its developer teams. The idea is that "the security in the pipelines behind [the code] kind of just happens" for developers. They spend less time on security, but management doesn't need to worry that developer teams aren't addressing it at all, he explained.

The TAP 1.4 security-focused updates include improvements to building and running Kubernetes clusters behind the scenes with Tanzu service mesh, easier scanner configuration in air-gapped environments, and the integration of VMware Carbon Black for image scanning enhancements. From the developer point of view, this "abstracts away in the DevSecOps pipeline those critical elements of the lifecycle," Hieatt said.

Hieatt anticipates enterprise customers will appreciate the work VMware has done to simplify the move to cloud-native architectures based on the vendor's learnings since Tanzu's early days.

An unnamed large banking customer in the U.S., for example, is considering shifting its cloud workloads from Tanzu Application Service (TAS) – which Hieatt described as similar to TAP without Kubernetes under the hood – to the TAP platform.

"There's an adapter we've written, for example, that gives that TAS-like experience, that simple push-my-code experience in the TAP world," he said. Although the two offerings are like apples and oranges because they "aren't solving the same problem," that simplified developer experience of TAS is being increasingly applied to TAP, he noted.