At VMware, as we talk to enterprise customers about their application deployment patterns, challenges, and future requirements, we observe a common theme. Most of them are embarking on a modern application design and deployment path by using containers and Kubernetes as foundational technologies and by implementing their applications as microservices.

You have to make lots of technical, architectural, and organizational choices. Knowing what your peers, analysts, and tech leaders are thinking about can help you make decisions about where and how to invest your time, money, and energy. That’s why we’ve compiled this roundup of ideas from tech decision makers, leaders, and analysts to help you focus.

VMware continues to heavily invest in Cloud Foundry and Tanzu Application Service, VMware’s distribution of Cloud Foundry, to ensure it remains the best place to run business-critical applications. Let’s dive a little deeper to see these exciting investments in action.

As a product designer at VMware Tanzu Labs, I’m often having conversations on the value of design in product development. I was discussing design with a client stakeholder one day and made the comment that “Nobody can tell who the designer is on my team.” At first, they were a bit confused by this statement. “Aren’t the designers the ones who create the designs of the product?” they said.

Operators using VMware Tanzu Mission Control can now create and manage image registry secrets. This new feature of Tanzu Mission Control enables people to create image registry secrets in a single namespace and make them available for use by all namespaces in a cluster, providing a single place to manage all registry secrets for that cluster.

Releasing new features seamlessly with no downtime in a rapidly evolving microservices-based application can be challenging. VMware Tanzu Service Mesh makes this process easier, removing much of the complexity involved with rolling out progressive updates to cloud native apps. Here we explain how it works.

VMware Tanzu Application Platform is a modular, application-aware platform that gives developers a prepaved path to production for building and deploying software on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster. Designed to deliver a superior and secure developer experience, it makes the software supply chain even more secure with a suite of features, including vulnerability scanning, a software bill of materials, and image signing, and more.

Today, I’m delighted to announce that Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is now generally available. Application Transformer for Tanzu is a tool that aids in the discovery, analysis, and containerization of legacy applications, thus helping customers to simplify and accelerate their app modernization journeys by targeting their re-platforming strategy on the well-known “5 R” modernization framework.

Modern product management philosophy encourages teams to use user-centered design, lean startup techniques, and agile development practices to build successful products that meet customer needs and respond to changes in technology and the marketplace.