Security is a constant concern for businesses large and small, public and private. Data breaches and software supply chain attacks are occurring more and more frequently. A growing gap in the cybersecurity workforce is hampering security efforts in every type of organization. And with the average cost of a data breach currently at $4.24 million, leaders have significant motivation to look for new and innovative ways to mitigate cybersecurity risk in their organizations.

At VMware, we make use of modern development and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices on a regular basis. And those of us who work on the VMware Tanzu Observability product marketing team regularly get exposure to various SRE teams that implement modern practices with the observability technology we create.

Modern microservices-based applications bring with them a new set of challenges when it comes to operating at scale across multiple clouds. While the goal of most modernization projects is to increase the velocity at which business features are created, with this increased speed comes the need for a highly flexible, microservices-based architecture. The result is that the architectural convenience created on day 1 by developers turns into a challenge for site reliability engineers (SREs) on day 2.

A few months ago, we introduced a new messaging topology operator. As we noted in our announcement post, this new Operator—we use the upper-cased “Operator” to denote Kubernetes Operators vs. platform or service human operators—takes the concept of VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ infrastructure-as-code another step forward by allowing platform or service operators and developers to quickly create users, permissions, queues, and exchanges, as well as queue policies and parameters.

The agile transformation services market will grow at a compounded rate of 19.5 percent annually by 2026, according to Allied Market Research. The overall digital transformation services market, meanwhile, is estimated by Forbes to be worth trillions of dollars. Indeed, if we scroll through the annual reports of Fortune 500 companies over the last decade, many of them will detail going through some version of a digital transformation.

Modern application architectures are complex, typically consisting of hundreds of distributed microservices implemented in different languages and by different teams. As a developer, SRE, or DevOps engineer, you are responsible for the reliability and performance of these complex systems. But while you might have metrics that will help you debug when there’s an issue, metrics alone can’t help you narrow down and ultimately identify the root cause.

We are excited to announce the general availability of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.4. This release introduces improvements and updates to networking, packages, the user experience, and as always, Kubernetes versioning, with support for Kubernetes 1.21.2. In this post, we will focus on some of the new capabilities offered in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.4 that further support our customers with their Kubernetes journey.

The world of retail has changed dramatically over the past decade, and in ways far beyond a black-and-white shift from shopping in stores to shopping online. Today, e-commerce is table stakes, meaning companies distinguish themselves—among other avenues—via user experience, promotions, fast shipping, and omnichannel experiences that integrate digital and brick-and-mortar locations.

It’s inspiring to see all of the customers that are delivering great applications securely and at scale with VMware Tanzu Application Service on any cloud as well as on-premises. One great example is Albertsons, which has managed a tremendous increase in e-commerce and grocery delivery traffic with zero downtime during the COVID-19 crisis.

VMware Spring Cloud Gateway for Kubernetes, the powerful distributed API gateway loved by application developers like you no matter what programming language you use, has been improved with some brand new capabilities. Spring Cloud Gateway for Kubernetes now supports the loading of your own extensions so you can customize them to your own specific needs. Capturing metrics and trace data into your observability tools of choice is also easier than ever before.

Today at VMware’s annual SpringOne developer conference, we announced the public beta* of ​Tanzu​ Application Platform. With Tanzu Application Platform, application developers and operations teams can build and deliver a better multi-cloud developer experience on any Kubernetes distribution, including Azure Kubernetes Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, as well as software offerings like Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.