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vSphere Event-Driven Automation using Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service

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Right before the holiday, I had spent some time exploring Tanzu Application Platform (TAP), which also recently GA'ed. TAP provides developers with an application-aware platform that focuses on making the developer experience easy for developing, building and running applications on Kubernetes.


If you are interested in a quick technical deep dive into TAP, check out this video by Scott Sisil, introducing TAP:

One of the core components of TAP is the Cloud Native Runtime (CNR), which is VMware's commercial offering of the popular open source project Knative. The VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project also makes use of Knative as our backend to provide customers with an event-driven automation solution.

Early on in the VEBA project, we knew that we wanted to develop and innovate with the community in the open but we also understood there would be users who would want an officially supported offering that they can call or file support requests when needed. Early last year, Michael Gasch, the lead architect for VEBA started to port the code from the VMware Event Router, which is the heart of VEBA into CNR's Tanzu Sources for vSphere and start unifying the two code bases. The goal is to ensure that users of the open source project VEBA will also have a consistent user experience in terms of function deployment when using the commercial offering.

As shared back in Dec, I was able to successfully deploy TAP, CNR and Sources for vSphere all running on our Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service which includes both our on-premises offering called vSphere with Tanzu and our managed service offering called VMware Cloud with Tanzu services. For those interested, you can find the instructions below on how to deploy and configure TAP to enable vSphere event-driven automation capabilities for your infrastructure.

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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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Quick demo videos of new VMware Cloud with Tanzu services

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VMware Cloud with Tanzu services is VMware's new managed Kubernetes offering that incorporates the vSphere with Tanzu technology delivered as a managed service as part of our VMware Cloud service offering. The initial release of Tanzu services is currently available on VMware Cloud on AWS, which will require SDDC version 1.16 and a request for enablement (contact your VMware account team) prior to deploying a new SDDC and enabling Tanzu services.

Note: In future, Tanzu services will also be enabled for existing SDDC (brownfield) as well as for other VMware Cloud Infrastructure Services, stay tuned!

Using Tanzu services with VMware Cloud is literally night and day when compared to installing and configuring vSphere with Tanzu yourself, which includes a number of other components to setup! As you would expect, as a service, it is simply a click of a button or API call and users only have to provide four basic input (technically three if you leave one of the recommended defaults) 🙂


Rather than talk about how the new Tanzu service works and some of the things you can do with the service right now, I figured I would record a few quick demo videos. You can find the Youtube playlist below if you wish to watch them all and I have also included a link to a Github repo for the demo examples that were used. Hope you enjoy!

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