New VMware Tanzu platform enhancements and Spring with Spring AI, Spring Boot 3.2, and Data Services to fuel next generation of modern apps

VMware Explore 2023—VMware, Inc. today announced new updates to Spring, the leading Java development framework, plus enhancements across VMware Tanzu Platforms, VMware Tanzu Data Services, and VMware Tanzu Intelligence Services that will help teams develop, operate, and optimize higher-performing applications more quickly, cost-effectively, and securely.

Software development teams are at the forefront of business innovation, building modern applications that drive market share growth and revenue. However, the ability to quickly deliver applications that integrate leading-edge technology like AI and machine learning is often complicated by the need to learn new tools, platforms, and acquire additional skills even as more software delivery responsibilities shift left. Generative AI continues to reshape industries and presents a massive opportunity for all organizations.

“Today, the velocity of innovation is what differentiates companies from the competition. The value of next generation apps will be accelerated through new capabilities like machine learning and artificial intelligence and scalability across any cloud,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager of Modern Apps and Management Business Group, VMware. “We have been focused on providing developers with great tools and experiences for decades. As we mark the 20th anniversary of Spring this year, our latest enhancements and deep integration to the Tanzu Platform give application teams the ability to leverage more cutting-edge technology like AI in new apps and take those apps to production quickly, safely, and more securely.”

Modern Data Integration and Innovation with VMware Tanzu Application Platform

Modern application development and delivery is increasingly complex, leaving organizations with too many silos, inefficiencies, and risk. VMware Tanzu simplifies the experience of the underlying infrastructure, security, tooling, content and data services, and developer experience so application and infrastructure teams can better collaborate on the delivery of higher quality apps, securely and at scale, to any cloud, anywhere. VMware Tanzu has introduced the following enhancements across its app platform offerings to help developers and platform teams deliver business outcomes with software:

• Tanzu Application Platform adds DORA metrics with Deployment Frequency and Lead Time for Changes in the developer portal, enabling teams to track and benchmark their software delivery performance to continuously assess and improve software delivery practices while providing greater transparency and accountability to business goals.
• VMware Tanzu Spring Runtime is now integrated in Tanzu Application Platform, including a commercial subscription to Spring tools with extended support for a seamless experience in building mission-critical Java applications with Spring.
• VMware Tanzu Application Service 5.0 improves the developer experience with a new Postgres tile for DBaaS and AI tile (beta) with an included trained LLM available to the familiar “cf push” experience, reduces platform costs and improved disaster recovery workflows, and expands cloud availability with support for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

Spring Enhancements Enable Developers with AI and App Security

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of Spring, the most common framework for Java development and the 10^th anniversary of Spring Boot which continues to grow 50% year over year for 5 years running¹. With Spring, developers can stay ahead of ever-shifting technological transformations by having innovative new capabilities integrated into a familiar Spring experience for a simplified path to building next-generation applications.

Today’s updates are designed to improve application performance, reduce costs, and improve security to be well-suited for modern operating models like cloud containers and serverless, including:

• The general availability of Spring Boot 3.2 and Spring Framework 6.1 release enables developers to create GraalVM native images that use Spring Boot and Java 21's virtual threads (Project Loom) to achieve better app runtime scalability, energy efficiency, startup time, and RAM consumption.
• Spring AI is a newly graduated project designed to simplify and streamline the development of AI applications by enabling developers to use the familiar Spring Framework with simplified commands to add AI capabilities to their application development process.
• VMware Tanzu Spring Health Assessment helps organizations understand their Spring application portfolio’s dependencies and identify security issues. This allows organizations to effectively remediate issues, improve software compliance, and mitigate risk.

Tanzu Data Services integrates Machine Learning (ML) and AI Capabilities and Simplifies Data Fleet Management

Integral to modern application architecture are data services, including messaging, caching, processing, and databases to power next-generation workloads across any cloud. Tanzu Data Services enhancements add new ML/AI capabilities, improve and optimize performance, and streamline management, including:

• Tanzu Greenplum’s automated machine learning agent (beta) to simplify and streamline machine learning set-up and tasks; VMware Tanzu GemFire Vector DB Extension to deliver low-latency querying for next generation use cases, such as generative AI and natural language processing; VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ 1.6 for high throughput data messaging for resource-limited environments, including Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge applications.
• A simplified bundle of all of the data offerings, plus a new VMware Tanzu Data Hub (tech preview) that will unify and streamline fleet management of VMware Tanzu and ecosystem data services across multiple clouds and Kubernetes environments.

Tanzu Intelligence Services Enables Proactive Governance and Continuous Optimization

Tanzu Intelligence Services, first introduced at VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, helps organizations gain deep insights into, continuously improve, and proactively govern the cost, performance, and security of their apps and clouds by policy in near real-time to adjust to the changing needs of business. New capabilities include:

• VMware Tanzu CloudHealth empowers organizations to achieve cloud sustainability goals with GreenOps support (beta), giving visibility into power consumption and carbon emissions with recommendations for rightsizing the cloud environments.
• VMware Tanzu Guardrails enhances proactive governance and continuous compliance with reports to highlight key findings, including configuration drift, policy violations, and vulnerabilities across multiple cloud environments.
• VMware Tanzu Application Catalog enhances open-source content security with new customization of open-source artifacts to the base OS image and form factor aligned to corporate standards and the ability to centrally view and browse the inventory of open-source software bill of materials (SBOMs).

Capabilities within the Tanzu platform will continue to integrate into a common control plane, VMware Tanzu Hub. Today, we’re announcing enhancements to Tanzu Hub including a refreshed user experience and navigation; integrated observability solution from Tanzu Insights; migration planning and assessments from VMware Tanzu Transformer; cost reports from Tanzu CloudHealth including Cloud Smart Summary, Cost History, Rightsizing, Anomaly Detection; and enhancements to Intelligent Assist in Tanzu to search external sources like 3^rd third-party documentation in addition to environment inventory to better diagnose and resolve issues across environments.