Broadcom Tanzu Strategy Revolves Around Platform Engineering
Broadcom is narrowing its cloud-native computing strategy to focus on IT organizations that have adopted platform engineering as a methodology for managing application development and deployment.
Purnima Padmanabhan, general manager for the Tanzu Division at Broadcom, said following the launch this week of the Tanzu 10 platform and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, Broadcom will focus its efforts on serving organizations that have a mature appreciation for how to build and maintain a private infrastructure-as-a-service that enables developers to self-service their requirements. Those IT teams are embracing platform engineering to unify the management of IT by adopting a cloud operating model through which infrastructure resources are programmatically consumed via application programming interfaces (APIs), she noted.
Tanzu and VCF are not a good fit for organizations that have adopted a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to integrating Kubernetes and all the associated components required to build and deploy cloud-native applications, added Padmanabhan.
In time, however, many of those organizations will tire of maintaining all the various components on their own and will instead eventually opt for a pre-integrated platform that is more resilient, she added. In contrast, every time a component is updated, an IT team essentially has to rebuild their platform over again, noted Padmanabhan.
At the core of the Broadcom Tanzu strategy is a light-weight equivalent of a platform-as-a-service PaaS environment, known as application spaces, that when integrated with the Spring framework from VMware makes it simpler to build and deploy Java applications in a cloud-native computing environment, said Padmanabhan.
That layer of abstraction 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 essence, it is a variation of the same PaaS approach that Pivotal Software employed to create the open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS. Pivotal Software, which also developed the Spring framework for Java, became part of VMware at the end of 2019.
In effect, Broadcom is making a case for increasing the velocity at which applications can be built in exchange for less platform flexibility when it comes to, for example, upgrading individual components.
It’s not clear how many IT organizations will continue to prefer to build and maintain their own platforms but the one certain thing is the number of cloud-native applications being deployed only continues to steadily increase. At the same time, organizations still need to update and maintain legacy monolithic applications running on virtual machines. Broadcom provides organizations with a single vendor that enables organizations to achieve both of those goals.
Each organization will need to decide to what degree platform engineering as a methodology for managing IT will work for them. Many DevOps teams, for example, have already embraced public clouds as their primary means for invoking IT infrastructure using APIs. One of the primary reasons they chose that path was so they would no longer be beholden to a centralized IT organization. Convincing them that those centralized IT teams now have the platforms and skills required to provide the equivalent of a private cloud will undoubtedly require a lot more than a proof-of-concept (PoC).
