VMware has kicked off its virtual VMworld 2021 conference with a slew of announcements focused on helping customers overcome common challenges when building applications, particularly in the era of Kubernetes.

"A lack of experience and expertise with Kubernetes is the number one challenge that organisations are facing with trying to adopt Kubernetes," VMware Tanzu product marketing lead Dormain Drewitz told media.

"We also know that the way practitioners are learning is they're learning by doing, and so making that easier for our customers and users to learn by doing, we want them to be able to learn by doing with us."

To help overcome these challenges, VMware has introduced Tanzu Community Edition, a freely available Kubernetes platform for learners and users. The open-source software, which is the same one used in the Tanzu Commercial Edition, can be installed and configured on a local workstation or cloud of choice, and automates end-to-end application delivery.

Image: VMware

"Something that's important about the Community Edition is that this is not trialware; this is freely available software that's community-supported, but it's a better experience than what folks get, if they're trying to go pick through all the different components of the container ecosystem that's out there," Drewitz said.

Additionally, a free tier of Tanzu Mission Control, known as Tanzu Mission Control Starter, will be available. It's designed to help users manage their Kubernetes clusters whether it's located on-premise or in any public clouds.

Like Tanzu Community Edition, Mission Control Starter will not be a trialware, Drewitz said, noting that she believes both Tanzu Community Edition and Mission Control Starter will create easy paths for customers to move to the commercial versions when they're ready to go into production.

VMware is also adding GPU support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for not only vSphere, but also Amazon Web Services and Azure environments. It will also enable enterprises to speed up the integration of AI workloads. Drewitz touted the feature is "one of the most popular" requests for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.

The cloud giant is also expanding its Tanzu Application Platform beta with Phase 2 to include supply chain choreography that will be customisable and include ID support as code moves along the production path.

"If you look at the cloud-native computing landscape, you look at all the different open-source projects out there that are available, there's a lot to stitch together if you're trying to build a usable experience, and it really creates a huge barrier for developers to be able to get started and actually deploy applications to Kubernetes," Drewitz said.

"We've taken our experience with Spring and the Cloud Foundry community, and we've learned from previous betas that we've been running in community and with customers to be able to see, this is really the way that folks can streamline and gain control over how applications are built and deployed onto Kubernetes."

VMware

Patch these vulnerable products or remove them from your network, CISA warnsMicrosoft: This botnet has new tricks to target Linux and Windows systemsHackers are getting faster at exploiting zero-day flaws. That's going to be a problemBroadcom makes a$61 billion play for VMware

• Patch these vulnerable products or remove them from your network, CISA warns
• Microsoft: This botnet has new tricks to target Linux and Windows systems
• Hackers are getting faster at exploiting zero-day flaws. That's going to be a problem
• Broadcom makes a$61 billion play for VMware