VMware recently released Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) version 1.4 which is introducing a lot of new capabilities and enhancements to even further improve the developer’s experience while wotking with any Kubernetes clusters.

What is VMware Tanzu Application Platform?

Tanzu Application platform is a modular, application-aware platform that runs on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster. It delivers a superior developer experience with a pre-paved path to production including all the needed components pre-configured for developer teams to build and deploy software quickly and securely. Additionally it is a composable platform which makes it customizable based on the organization’s preferences.

With Tanzu Application Platform you can deliver revenue-generating applications to market more quickly because your developers can spend more time building great software instead of toiling and stitching components together. You can realize economies of scale from your multi-cloud Kubernetes platform that lets you:

-> Release developer’s productivity

• Pre-configured app scaffolding with invisible guardrails
• Serverless runtimes make advanced patterns accessible
• Replaceable and decomposable Kubernetes primitives for platform teams

-> Build rapid and sustainable path to production

• Quickly deliver value with pre-wired pipelines and customizable opinions
• Adapters to “break glass” and swap out individual parts

-> Truly coordinate the work of dev and ops in the organization

• Thoughtfully designed user interfaces for each team
• Separation of concerns
• Seamless handoff of applications from developer inner loop to DevOps outer loop

TAP 1.4 – key new features that in my opinion will be the most useful:

• Shared Ingress Issuer for secure ingress communication by default. CNRs, AppSSO, and Tanzu Application Platform GUI use this issuer to secure ingress. Over future releases, VMware plans to incrementally update all Tanzu Application Platform components to support the shared ingress issuer.
• Tanzu Application Platform Telemetry Reports offers the option to enroll in a usage reporting program that provides a usage summary of your Tanzu Application Platform.
• Namespace Provisioner provides a secure, automated way for Platform Operators to provision namespaces with the resources and proper namespace-level privileges required for their workloads to function as intended.
• Tanzu Developer Tools for Visual Studio is an IDE extension for Visual Studio to help you develop, providing the rapid iteration experience for .NET Core apps in Tanzu Application Platform
• LDAP is now a supported identity provider protocol – that is something I’ve been waiting!
• Optional Git repository creation during project generation is supported in the Application Accelerator extension for VS Code
• You can now activate or deactivate the automatic configuration of Spring Boot actuators on Tanzu Application Platform and on workloads
• Tanzu Application Platform repackages External Secrets Operatos which is an open source Kubernetes operator into a Carvel bundle that ships with Tanzu Application Platform. Currently in alpha!

Additionally support for OpenShift 4.11 and Kubernetes 1.25 was added.

Apart from the improvements listed above there is a long list of vulnerabilities that were eliminated and fixed in this release including CVE-2022-4378 which is a high severity, exploitable stack overflow flaw found in the Linux kernel’s SYSCTL subsystem.

If you want to learn more see release notes page.