Alex - stock.adobe.com

VMware Tanzu hones integration, but faces Broadcom backlash

VMware Tanzu now offers a single UI for Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, a feature years in the making, but the improvement could get lost in post-Broadcom drama.

VMware Tanzu Platform 10 will complete a yearslong effort to fully unify management for Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, but that message might get lost amid wider upheavals for VMware customers under Broadcom.

Despite doubts among industry observers about whether Tanzu would continue beyond the acquisition close, Broadcom has funneled investment into Tanzu since it finalized the $69 billion acquisition in December.

This week, the company said it plans to offer a long-sought-after single interface for platform engineers to serve both Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry infrastructure resources within Tanzu Hub to developers. Previously, what is now called Tanzu Platform had come in separate editions for Kubernetes, called Tanzu Application Platform, and for Cloud Foundry, called Tanzu Application Service. Earlier efforts to bring the open source underpinnings of the two together had been scrapped.

Expected to ship by November, Tanzu Platform 10 will offer "a Cloud-Foundry-like developer experience for Kubernetes with ... an application-centric layer of abstraction to allow applications to run with consistent operational governance and compliance," according to a press release issued this week.

VMware by Broadcom also said this week it will move Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Supervisor, one of its managed versions of the Kubernetes container orchestration framework, into VMware Cloud Foundation in the forthcoming version 9. Other VMware-specific versions of Kubernetes -- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition, which includes VMware NSX network virtualization, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management Cluster, which supports edge telecom deployments -- will remain part of Tanzu Platform, but optional.

Though VMware by Broadcom has drastically reduced the number of a la carte products available to customers, Tanzu Platform does not require buying the rest of the vendor's products. Tanzu Platform supports any Kubernetes distro compliant with CNCF standards and cloud hyperscalers' Kubernetes infrastructure services, such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), according to Broadcom representatives.

Industry watchers were unconvinced, however, that Tanzu Platform updates will resonate with the market as existing customers express dissatisfaction with new VMware product packaging and pricing under Broadcom.

"[VMware/Broadcom] aims to prove [Tanzu Platform] can compete as a standalone product ... to provide PaaS for applications," said Rob Strechay, lead analyst at enterprise tech media company TheCube. "I think this is a tall order from a go-to-market perspective ... I am not sure I would buy this to manage AKS or EKS."

One enterprise platform engineer who works with both Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes said the door is still open to VMware by Broadcom, but for the foreseeable future, his company is happy to stick with open source components, including Cloud Foundry, upstream Kubernetes and the Carvel app management framework.

"In terms of a cost-benefit [analysis], the juice has to be worth the squeeze," said Greg Otto, executive director of developer experience platforms at Comcast. "In terms of how much we would be willing to pay, and does that offset enough of the costs of continuing to do things the way that we have been ... that's a long shot."

VMware Tanzu AI tie-in draws skepticism

Broadcom touted Tanzu Platform 10 this week as a springboard for enterprises to rapidly develop generative AI applications. The product supports a variety of applications and programming languages, but it offers some advanced features, especially for Java environments that use the Spring programming framework.

"We are bringing the power of GenAI to Java developers through the integrated Spring AI experience," said Purnima Padmanabhan, general manager of the Tanzu division at Broadcom, during a press briefing last week. "With a built-in AI server that is there in Tanzu Platform, [users] can secure access to any models ... control the amount of model usage and the types of model usage [as well as] the privacy of data, and ... improve the accuracy and performance with the models that you choose, but also the databases that you choose."

Torsten Volk, analyst, Enterprise Strategy GroupTorsten Volk

The initial focus on integration with Java and Spring apps is likely to limit Tanzu Platform's appeal to the broader generative AI market for now, where most applications are developed using Python, said Torsten Volk, an analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group.

"If I was a Java developer and somebody could give me [this easy platform experience], I would be cheering," Volk said. "But data science is done in Python, not Java, and the argument for allowing Java developers to do data science without learning Python is not my favorite part of [the VMware/Broadcom] strategy."

Ongoing controversy over VMware by Broadcom's shifting relationship with AWS might also give developers pause about trusting Tanzu Platform as a truly neutral means to manage third-party AI and cloud infrastructure, Volk said.

"Having that message of commoditizing the public cloud ... is great for customers who are buying fully into the VMware universe," he said. "But most developers like all of the public cloud APIs that they can use, and they do not want to be locked in to VMware."

Tanzu's path forward unclear amid VMware exodus

Though Tanzu Platform doesn't require the other VMware license subscriptions that have drawn customer ire in the last eight months, some analysts believe it will be a casualty of an overall market migration away from VMware because of dramatic price increases under Broadcom -- some as high as 700%.

Naveen Chhabra, analyst, Forrester ResearchNaveen Chhabra

Forrester Research predicted 20% of VMware customers would "escape the VMware stack," in its October 2023 technology predictions report for 2024, which has been borne out so far, according to Naveen Chhabra, an analyst at the firm.

"Customers are not looking at product features right now," Chhabra said. "They are [ticked] off with all the major changes [Broadcom has] done ... Most customers are busy looking at, 'OK, how can I move away from VMware?'"

As a result, competitors for different components of the VMware platform will likely attract many small and midsize customers unable or unwilling to pay a new price premium, such as Nutanix for hyperconverged infrastructure, and IBM Red Hat OpenShift and SUSE Rancher for hybrid cloud developer platforms, according to a report by TheCube Research this month.

"It makes sense for certain-size customers that can manage the Broadcom tax so they don't have to change their infrastructure and operations workflows," TheCube's Strechay said. "[But] customers with applications that don't fit the return on investment will fall off ... It's accelerating the transition of VMware to being the next mainframe -- not dead, but not pervasive."

If you're a company with 10,000 virtual machines, [leaving VMware] is just not an option.
Keith TownsendPresident, The CTO Advisor

This is likely something Broadcom anticipated, according to Keith Townsend, president at The CTO Advisor, a Futurum Group company. Its strategy is to focus on VMware's largest customers who will be willing to pay a premium to continue to use its products rather than pay switching costs -- where there are even competitive products to switch to, he said.

"If you're a company with 10,000 virtual machines, [leaving VMware] is just not an option," Townsend said. "If you're deep in VMware NSX, for example, or using advanced features of the hypervisor, quite frankly, there's not anything that's really competing with all of those specific features. So you're kind of stuck."

That's true for the near future, Chhabra said, but he predicted that even "stuck" customers won't necessarily want to buy in further with VMware for cloud-native applications and AI.

"They're not going to expect those capabilities from VMware -- these initiatives are responsibilities of a different [buyer] for infrastructure," he said. "These two will not merge into one [buyer], saying, 'Hey, you know what? We get infrastructure from VMware. Let's get AI from VMware.'"

Keith Townsend, president, The CTO AdvisorKeith Townsend

Townsend said he believes the opposite -- that the captive VMware audience of very large customers under Broadcom will also find expanding into its app modernization and AI infrastructure projects more feasible than integrating another new platform.

That will be enough for Broadcom to consider the acquisition successful, even if a higher volume of smaller customers leaves, he said.

"If you're managing [IT and human] resources, do you dedicate these resources to leading AI projects, which are revenue-generating and the highest priority of the board of directors, or do [you] put them on moving your infrastructure from VMware to something else?" Townsend said. "Even if it went off without a hitch, as a large enterprise, [you] might save a million dollars in VMware licensing, but lose a bigger opportunity in AI."

Beth Pariseau, senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.

Dig Deeper on DevOps

Software Quality
App Architecture
Cloud Computing
SearchAWS
TheServerSide.com
Data Center
Close