In the face of turbulent macroeconomic times, businesses must prioritize software agility to enable resilience. However, the adoption of such agility at scale is challenging given the different clouds, tools, methodologies, and skills required to successfully accelerate and mature application delivery. As cloud-native concepts and adoption continue to grow, it’s essential to invest in capabilities that accelerate developer productivity, drive revenue, and remain competitive.

Recently, VMware, Inc. announced new capabilities across the VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria platforms to empower customers with the capabilities to take a cloud-smart approach to modern application delivery across any cloud. The announcement comes as companies continue to struggle with the cumbersome balancing act of juggling multiple tools, teams, clouds, and operating models while keeping developers productive and operations teams equipped to keep pace.

“Our customers tell us they need to rapidly innovate while managing costs, security, and performance,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, General Manager and SVP, Modern Applications and Management Business Group, VMware. “This scenario demands a new approach around a common cloud-native app platform and a multi-disciplinary platform engineering team. In response, we expedited the launch of new capabilities across VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria. We are committed to helping customers drive innovation and optimization every step of the app development and cloud management journey.”

The new capabilities across the VMware Tanzu and VMware Aria platforms include:

Tanzu Application Platform 1.5: This platform enables companies to build and deploy more software quickly and securely through a rich set of developer tooling. It offers pre-paved, more secure golden paths to production customized to their business. The Tanzu Application Platform 1.5 release enhances end-to-end app security, streamlines developer and platform engineering experiences, and expands support for leading third-party integrations. The platform also offers more streamlined deployments at scale on EKS with AWS QuickStart, expanded Azure support, out-of-the-box and expanded customer choice of security tools like auto-configuration of Transport Layer Security (TLS), and support for external security tools for secrets management.

Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations: As part of its commitment to supporting customers at every stage of Kubernetes platform maturity, VMware also announced several updates to Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations that aim to increase security, choice, and operational efficiency of multi-cluster and multi-Kubernetes platform operations across any cloud. Tanzu Mission Control now supports full lifecycle management of new and existing AWS EKS clusters, the ability to mutate the security context for containers and pods, and allows the modification of OPA Gatekeeper policy settings at all levels, such as organization, cluster group, and cluster.

VMware Aria: The company is introducing innovations across the VMware Aria platform, including Aria Hub powered by Aria Graph, Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, and Aria Guardrails. VMware Aria solutions help cloud operations teams to harness multi-cloud capabilities with intelligent insights into distributed environments and provide the capabilities that enable optimized cost, performance, and security of applications and infrastructure aligned with business priorities. In times of increased budget scrutiny, the increased governance, security, and cost management that the VMware Aria portfolio provides is vital for business leaders focused on efficiency and scale.

VMware Aria Cost: For expanded multi-cloud cost management, VMware Aria Cost now includes support for Alibaba Cloud, enabling customers and partners to gain visibility into all Alibaba Cloud costs and usage in a single platform and streamline decision-making. The addition of Alibaba Cloud expands existing VMware Aria Cost support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, VMware Cloud on AWS (beta), data center, and containerized environments.

VMware Aria Operations: VMware is continuing to automate and streamline cloud infrastructure management with full-stack visibility across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. With the new integration between VMware Aria Operations and Aria Observability, IT teams can gain contextualized visibility across their infrastructure, Kubernetes environments, and applications. This integration eliminates the need for disparate tools to manage multi-clouds effectively and provides a holistic platform view, enabling faster troubleshooting and reducing mean-time-to-resolution to improve application performance. The integration also helps organizations achieve their cloud resilience and agility goals while keeping costs under control. VMware’s commitment to providing customers with cloud-smart application delivery capabilities across any cloud is evident in its constant innovation and updates to the Tanzu and Aria platforms.