Broadcom Revamps Tanzu to Simplify Cloud-Native App Development and Deployment
Broadcom Inc. today at the VMware Explore 2024 conference unveiled a VMware Tanzu 10 platform that promises to make it easier for developers to build cloud-native applications while also providing IT teams with a control plane and governance tools needed to manage Kubernetes clusters at scale.
In addition, Broadcom is adding a set of Tanzu AI Solutions, a set of capabilities within the Tanzu Platform that make it simpler to build and deploy generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
Purnima Padmanabhan, general manager for the Tanzu Division at Broadcom, said the goal is to provide developers with a framework to simply build cloud-native applications safely.
At the core of that effort is a layer of abstraction, known as application spaces, that isolates developers from the underlying operational issues that can be managed by, for example, a platform engineering team using the Tanzu Salt configuration management platform and command line interface (CLI) tools to programmatically deploy Kubernetes clusters.
In effect, those application spaces provide a lighter-weight equivalent of a platform-as-a-service PaaS environment. Much of the design principles used to create VMware Tanzu 10 come from the open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS originally developed by Pivotal Software, which ultimately was folded into VMware.
Other capabilities include visibility tools to identify relationships between applications and the underlying infrastructure they are deployed on along with built-in service bindings to connect applications to middleware and databases that can be automatically provisioned and hardened using the Tanzu Application Catalog.
In addition, an Application Advisor for Java applications developed using the Spring framework makes it simpler to secure applications, remediate vulnerabilities, enforce policies and conduct audits. There are also Java build packs that optimize start-up times for Spring applications.
Broadcom is also making available a set of Tanzu extensions for building and deploying generative AI applications, including observability and monitoring tools to identify the root cause of accuracy and performance issues involving large language models (LLMs).
In addition to providing support for Python, Tanzu AI Solutions includes Spring AI, an open-source application framework that can be used by Java developers to build applications, and an enhanced application programming interfaces (API) gateway that is based on the specification defined by OpenAI to connect to more than 100 open source LLMs.
Tanzu AI Solutions also supports VMware Private AI Foundation, an instance of that platform that is pre-integrated with IT infrastructure from NVIDIA.
Finally, Avi Load Balancer from Borad is now being integrated with Tanzu Application Service, along with adding support for the Gateway application programming interface (API) defined by the Technical Oversight Committee for Kubernetes. Broadcom also plans to add support for a generative AI co-pilot for Avi Load Balancer.
Ultimately, Broadcom is making a case for a more flexible PaaS experience on Kubernetes environments that enables developers to self-service their own needs without the IT and cybersecurity team unnecessarily having to impede their productivity. The challenge, as always, is getting the various fiefdoms with IT to sacrifice their prerogatives in the name of the greater good.
