VCF + TANZU: SOLVING THE 3 BIGGEST MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE AND APPS CHALLENGES

Infrastructure and Applications Troubles Got You Down? We’re Taking on the 3 Biggest Challenges. No tech solution is an island. Integration and collaboration across tools and teams keep the IT boat afloat. This is particularly true of brownfield modernization and cloud-native projects, which thrive on portability and flexibility but require integration. At the end of the day, organizations working to bring together infrastructure and applications components are looking to do two things:

Operate modern infrastructure with more stability at scale.
Develop modern applications with greater velocity.

But challenges get in the way. Teams often confront major challenges that lead to dead-in-the-water projects. According to a 2020 study by AHEAD, nearly 50% of enterprises report that their infrastructure teams can’t keep up with application development. If your team is taking a modern approach to infrastructure and applications, it’s likely you’ve met the three biggest hurdles to success. We’ll cover these hurdles and discuss how VMware Cloud Foundation and Tanzu can work in tandem to drive both modern infrastructure efficiency and applications development.

Modern Infrastructure and Applications Challenges

1) Traditional Infrastructure Troubles

Traditional infrastructure is complex to design, expensive to manage, and hard to secure. And, with larger enterprises particularly, it often exists as legacy components, tightly woven in a way that’s difficult to tease out. Downstream systems are dependent on traditional infrastructure like mainframes or on-prem data centers. This means that upkeep is tedious and complicated, but a necessity to keep IT running. Older systems can also be more susceptible to attack due to difficult, or even unavailable patching, and outdated designs that don’t account for today’s sophisticated cyber threats.

2) App Dev Delays

Organizations of all kind are increasingly finding themselves in the software business and that means a need for app dev speed. The reality is that application development is often delayed by wait times and slow resource procurement of infrastructure resources and environments. This friction drags down app dev times, costing the business precious moments of enhanced efficiency, better customer and employee experiences, and often missed revenue.

3) DevOps House Divided

As far as we’ve come in improving DevOps, a gap still remains between IT operators and developers. It’s an ever-growing divide that must be broken down for efficient infrastructure utilization and application development. While developers are focused on feature-rich applications, the operations side of the house wants operable, reliable software. There must be a middle ground where communication, education, and cooperation are facilitated.

Modern Infrastructure Enables Modern Applications

Individually, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and Tanzu can be leveraged for cloud management and app dev, respectively. Together, they become a powerhouse by helping organizations optimize infrastructure in a way that is highly flexible and speeds application development.

What is VCF?

VCF is a software-defined architecture that focuses on automating and simplifying VMware’s core offerings. It brings together components of vSphere, vCenter, vRealize, and NSX-T in an integrated, software-defined package. VCF helps organizations leverage the value that VMware provides, while at the same time limiting its complexity.

What is Tanzu?

VMware’s Tanzu portfolio takes a containers-first approach to applications development. It sits on top of vSphere and integrates with VMware tools, providing an array of services for both the infrastructure and applications side. Tanzu eases the burden of building, running, and maintaining separate environments by allowing for consolidation and consistency in a hybrid infrastructure landscape. It facilitates integration to help organizations move faster. VCF and Tanzu connect as an engine for modernization. VCF helps teams provision infrastructure quickly and smoothly, removing the governors from application development and letting it run full steam. It does this through:

A focus on applications and services so IT can reduce friction in deploying infrastructure
Flexible architecture with vSan, VxRail, or 3-tier
Modernized infrastructure enables a private cloud to deliver workloads as needed via VMs and/or containers in a single platform
Developer-ready infrastructure delivers resources via service catalog or programmatically through APIs

Combined, VCF and Tanzu remove infrastructure hurdles and speed development, leading to faster, better modern applications.