VMware offers Tanzu, a multicloud container orchestration platform that serves both a legacy cloud foundry customer base and new customers seeking a Kubernetes-based solution.
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Summary
When cloud-native technologies such as containers first appeared they were considered a possible threat to VMware’s business model. This is not the case today: VMware offers Tanzu, a multicloud container orchestration platform that serves both a legacy cloud foundry customer base and new customers seeking a Kubernetes-based solution. Moreover, many instances of container orchestration solutions run inside virtual machines, making for a spectrum of use cases for a variety of VMware solutions and playing to VMware’s strength as a horizontal technology player for multicloud/hybrid-cloud computing.
Clarifying VMware’s message to the business audience
VMware is at heart a technology company, a fact reflected in VMware’s Explore EMEA 2022 (Barcelona) keynotes, which were tech-jargon heavy. But to strike at the core message of multicloud/hybrid-cloud versatility in addition to sovereign cloud requirements, VMware needs to talk to the business. This is where it needs a better value-based language, talking about business outcomes; what technology best delivers these outcomes comes after the business message to a business audience. This messaging is also nuanced by region: VMware is already discovering that regulations matter a lot in Europe, Middle East & Africa and Asia where multiple jurisdictions abound, and they matter less to North American businesses that exist in a more homogeneous regulatory environment.
Tanzu offers a versatile cloud-native platform as a service
VMware Tanzu is a container orchestration platform as a service (PaaS) for multicloud environments. This product combines what was Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Heptio’s Kubernetes-based orchestration solution, Bitnami software delivery capabilities, and open source tools such as Flux for GitOps. To consider the Kubernetes use case, Tanzu is aimed at developers and operations administrators seeking to reduce the complexity of working with Kubernetes and to manage containerized applications across the range of cloud options. Tanzu’s open plug-in architecture allows end users that may have invested in rival container orchestration runtimes (such as Red Hat OpenShift, AWS EKS, etc.) to continue to use those while Tanzu Mission Control delivers the multicloud management, supply chain (sign, scan, build), security, developer portal, and DevOps capabilities. On the question of self-service versus fully managed Kubernetes, a range of options are available to users, and Tanzu Mission Control can act across an enterprise with different lines of business choosing their preferred Kubernetes runtimes, plugging into Tanzu.
New announcements include Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1, the Kubernetes runtime designed for container cluster ease of use in the enterprise cloud and edge, which now adds support for multicloud environments; new features in VMware Tanzu Mission Control that add support for GitOps toolchains; and Tanzu Service Mesh allowing containers and virtual machines (VMs) to be visible in the same service mesh.
Finally, VMware Aria (incorporating what was the vRealize, CloudHealth, and Tanzu Observability by Wavefront portfolio) sits one layer above Tanzu to offer a multicloud management capability, including cloud performance and health, cloud cost management, automated delivery, secure configuration, and SaltStack, the open source software that VMware acquired for IT infrastructure DevOps automation (offered in the Advanced and Enterprise versions of VMware Aria Universal Suite).
Cloud-native computing includes serverless services
Currently, VMware does not have a serverless services offering, although Knative, an open source solution for building serverless and event-driven Kubernetes-based applications, is embedded in Tanzu. Serverless computing is the ultimate low-code solution, where developers just focus on application business logic and let the serverless platform take care of all infrastructure concerns. What Knative in the Tanzu Application Platform offers is functions that run in the Kubernetes environment and can scale to zero, but there’s no software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that allows users to benefit from pay per use, which would entail calling serverless functions on a public cloud. It’s a gap in VMware’s portfolio and means there’s more for the company to do in completing its embrace of cloud-native computing. Omdia sees serverless computing growing in adoption, and we expect VMware will be adding it to its portfolio, maybe through an acquisition.
Appendix
Author
Michael Azoff, Chief Analyst, Cloud and Data Center Practice
