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Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is more than just an App Modernization Engine

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Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is an exciting solution that was launched last year as a Tech Preview, initially on VMware Cloud on AWS and shortly after for any vSphere environment. Application Transformer (App Transformer) is a continuous application modernization engine that enables organizations to easily assess all workloads running in a vSphere-based environment and provide a detailed application analysis including their topology and external dependencies, which can then be containerized by leveraging the App Transformer solution.

Note: If you are interested in deep diving into App Transformer and how it can help with your app modernization initiatives, check out my VMworld 2021 session recording MCL2290 - App Modernization Deep Dive with VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Tanzu to learn more.


Although the primary use case for App Transformer is for application modernization, I quickly realized App Transformer can actually benefit our broader VMware customers.

Regardless if you are starting a Cloud Migration or App Modernization project, I do believe App Transformer can be an invaluable tool that can provide organizations with deep insights into their overall application portfolio to help make better and informed decisions when managing and supporting their VMware infrastructure. In addition to this visibility, the information from App Transformer can also empower our IT Admins, which I also believe can be a key enabler to their organizations App Modernization efforts.

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VMware Cloud Enterprise Federation with Microsoft Azure Active Directory

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As a follow-up to my recent blog post on how to configure identity federation between VMware Cloud and AWS SSO using our the new Just-in-Time (JiT) provisioning method, I was also interested to see what the process looked like with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD), which is another popular identity provider, which can also benefit our Azure VMware Solution (AVS) customers leveraging VMware Cloud Services. Similar to AWS SSO, I had never worked with Azure AD before and this was a good opportunity to check out their service.

Here is a quick video for those interested in the final logon experience when VMware Cloud is using Azure AD as the identity provider:

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VMware Cloud Enterprise Federation with AWS SSO

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Earlier this week I came to learn about a really cool enhancement that was just added to our VMware Cloud Services Console called Connector-less Self-Service Enterprise Federation Setup, it's a bit of a mouth full, but it basically makes configuring identity federation between the VMware Cloud Services Console and other third party identity provider extremely easy.

Identity federation is not a new feature in VMware Cloud and it has been supported for some time now, but it required customers to deploy the Workspace ONE Access connector into their on-premises environment for federating with either their local or third party identity provider. The new method that was introduced is "connector-less" because it does not require any additional infrastructure to be deployed and it also leverages SAML JIT (Just-in-Time) dynamic provisioning.


While looking at the some the pre-defined identity providers, I noticed that AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) was not listed and since we have customers that use both VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services, this would certainly be a nice way to provide a common logon experience. Another benefit is also for customers using the new VMware Cloud with Tanzu services with Tanzu Mission Control (TMC), they can now easily manage secure access and provide their their end users the ability to provision and consume Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (TKC) without the need of exposing them to the underlying infrastructure which is managed by the Cloud Administrators.

This was certainly a few good reasons to try out this new feature, especially as I have never worked with AWS SSO before.

Here is a quick video for those interested in the final logon experience when VMware Cloud is using AWS SSO as the identity provider:

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