VMware Tanzu Application Platform Adds Buildpack Improvements and Application Limits

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VMware released a number of new features for the Tanzu Application Platform and the Tanzu Application Service. Tanzu Application Platform provides a multi-cloud platform that runs on Kubernetes. Tanzu Application Service is a delivery and operations platform. Some of the features include buildpack improvements, API maturity scoring, services to prevent the impact of noisy neighbors, and shared routes.

Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) is a composable platform that can be used to provide paved paths to developers. It is able to work both in cloud environments and on-premises. The 1.4 release improves the developer experience for both .NET and Java developers. A new developer sandbox for VS Code and IntelliJ allows for live updating and debugging of code without having to disable live debugging.

The 1.3 release introduced configuring workloads with associated API specifications and then automatically exposing them in the TAP GUI. This release adds in, as an alpha feature, an API maturity scoring based on the OpenAPI specification. The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard language-agnostic interface for HTTP APIs.

TAP GUI showing OpenAPI health score

Tanzu PHP Buildpacks are now generally available and installed as part of TAP. This particular buildpack is suited for building web applications. Cloud Native Buildpacks are used to produce OCI-compliant containers out of application code.

The Supply Chain Choreographer has been updated to allow for customized steps in the form of custom Tekton tasks. Tekton is an open-source framework for building CI/CD pipelines. As Daniel De Repentigny, senior product manager at Spotify, explains, a choreographer behaves differently than an orchestrator. De Repentigny notes that "an orchestrator defines each of the interactions between each of the microservices". This differs from a choreography model where interactions are more loosely defined:

In the choreography model, each step of the path to production and the tool required for that step knows nothing about the next step. It is responsible for receiving a signal that it must perform some work, completing it, and signaling that it has finished.

VMware also released version 3.0 of the Tanzu Application Service, their continuous delivery and operations platform. This release sees the introduction of a couple of features to reduce the impact of noisy applications. The fair CPU entitlement feature, when enabled, can minimize applications from taking CPU shares from other applications sharing the same cluster.

To reduce the impact of applications overwhelming logging infrastructure, it is now possible to configure logging quotes at the organization and space levels. In addition, log rate limits can be set for applications.

The introduction of shared routes that are visible across Cloud Foundry spaces simplifies the process of migrating applications from one space to another. Nick Kuhn, senior technical marketing architect at VMware Tanzu, notes that this provides for zero-downtime migrations and can be used "in the event of organizational or team responsibility change."

More details about both releases can be found on the TAP blog post and the Tanzu Application Service blog post.

Related Topics:

• DevOps
• PHP
• PaaS
• Visual Studio
• Platforms
• VMWare
• IntelliJ IDEA

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