Tanzu: Orchestrating DevOps agility at multicloud scale – Business

Broadcom Inc.’s acquisition of VMware Inc. was completed at the end of 2023. As the buyout neared finalization, profound speculation emerged on the future blueprint for VMware’s vast portfolio.

This “will they or won’t they” forecasting particularly shadowed Tanzu, VMware’s modular cloud-native platform for application development in multicloud environments. Ultimately, it continues to grow under Broadcom’s watch.

“What Broadcom has done is taken VMware’s many divisions and converged them down to four main divisions,” said Purnima Padmanabhan (pictured, left), general manager of the Tanzu Division at Broadcom. “The second division is Tanzu, and as a whole, it’s called the Tanzu Division. And the fundamental role of the Tanzu Division is to make sure that we focus on giving the industry an app platform to accelerate app delivery — Tanzu is the app platform.”

Padmanabhan and Ryan Morgan (right), senior director at Broadcom, spoke with John Furrier, theCUBE Research executive analyst, during an exclusive interview from SiliconANGLE Media’s studio in Palo Alto. They discussed the Tanzu Division’s pivotal role in VMware’s post-acquisition paradigm and the larger DevSecOps landscape. (* Disclosure below.)

How Tanzu fits into Broadcom’s product strategy

Building up to the acquisition, analyst signals pointed toward the simplification of VMware’s portfolio to be more streamlined, decluttered and easy to manage. Broadcom did just that, merging the entire line into four main divisions. Alongside Tanzu, there’s the VMware Cloud Foundation Division with vSphere and vSAN. Following that is the Networking & Security Division and, finally, the Edge Division, according to Padmanabhan.

Tanzu’s portfolio comprises several key components to facilitate seamless app development and deployment. At its core lies the Cloud Foundry-based Tanzu Application Service, a critical piece for app platform focus. Also, the platform has Kubernetes-based technologies, including the Kubernetes Mission Control and Service Mesh, alongside the Spring portfolio. This comprehensive suite of tools equips enterprises with a robust app platform tailored to their needs, according to Padmanabhan.

“It’s a very simple portfolio — you have platform, data and intelligence,” she said. “The idea is you build your applications on the platform, you attach your data sources and you make sure they’re managed all the time. The way we summarize it is we help our customers develop, operate and optimize their applications — and get them out to any environment, any cloud.”

For the four product divisions to exist as a synergistic portfolio, there must be an interplay between each one. By integrating the VCF and Tanzu platforms, VMware provides a seamless transition toward private cloud environments, where developers can harness the power of simplified app deployment and management, Padmanabhan explained.

For the future, Tanzu is continuing on the innovation path, with a focus on wider community engagement. With new releases, such as Spring Boot 3.3, promising enhanced performance and scalability, the platform is driving tech advancements and fostering collaborative ecosystems, according to Morgan.

“One of the big things we’re working on now is Spring AI,” he said. “It’s one of the most exciting projects probably since Spring Cloud. What we see is every customer now has an AI initiative — they have developers, and they have a lot of built-in expertise around Java. Now we have these LLMs that have API access. That is a perfect recipe for allowing those Spring developers to access those in an abstracted way.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Padmanabhan and Morgan:

(* Disclosure: VMware Tanzu. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)