VMware and Pivotal Extend Alliance to Deliver Developer Ready Infrastructure

VMware unveiled that the company is working with Pivotal to deliver “Developer-Ready Infrastructure.” Highlighted in a keynote address from VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger at Dell EMC World 2017, Developer-Ready Infrastructure mitigates friction between application developers and IT operations teams by increasing feature velocity and service levels, decreasing costs, and supporting ever more complex systems and application frameworks. Developer-Ready Infrastructure brings together Pivotal Cloud Foundry, one of the world’s most powerful cloud-native application platforms, and VMware software-defined data center solutions.

Mobility, apps and the cloud are all accelerating the pace of innovation while creating technological challenges for organizations of all sizes. To compete in this new era, organizations need to more quickly, efficiently and securely release new products and services that deliver engaging customer experiences. With this added pressure, developers and IT teams are struggling to work together to safeguard on-demand, seamless development while also providing enterprise-grade security, compliance and scale. IT and Line-of-Business (LOB) need a DevOps model that brings developers and IT teams together to allow for speed, scale and security.

“Digital transformation is on the minds of every business, big or small. To adapt, organizations need to bring together the best of modern developer environments to rock-solid data-center infrastructure, create synergies between developers and IT,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. “Developer-Ready Infrastructure represents a significant joint engineering effort between VMware and Pivotal at the intersection of developers and IT: developers are able to drive agility with a modern cloud native application platform from Pivotal, while IT has peace of mind knowing that it runs on a secure software-defined data-center pioneered by VMware.”

Developer-Ready Infrastructure was created with this in mind. Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides a cloud-native application platform that embraces a microservices approach to application development—allowing developers and enterpises to move at startup speeds. However, often Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD) can encounter friction in the face of infrastructure changes. VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) addresses these infrastructure challenges. Similarly, many of VMware’s SDDC customers are looking for more agile ways to support developers in a world where containers and cloud native meets production IT.

With the combination of VMware SDDC and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, developers can deliver the right software, faster and more frequently, significantly reducing the drag of traditional operational concerns, delays and extra code to guard against infrastructure issues. IT operators get software-defined compute, storage, networking, security and operational tooling automated for micro services-based application workloads running in containers. Developers gain the ability to accelerate micro services-based applications on top of the full SDDC stack.

“Today we are seeing major industries at an inflection point that requires the capability to rapidly respond to changing consumer expectations, and Pivotal is at the center of enabling that transformation” said Rob Mee, chief executive officer, Pivotal. “The shift to cloud-native applications is forcing every enterprise to think about IT organizations in terms of time to value, the speed at which you go from code completion to production and into the hands of customers. Developer Ready Infrastructure represents stellar engineering work between Pivotal and VMware to ensure developers and operators are always moving at startup speeds.”

In a world where microservices meet micro-segmentation, there are many benefits of running Pivotal Cloud Foundry with VMware NSX. From the start, customers can instantly provision their initial Pivotal Cloud Foundry networks and enable proper enterprise security posture. As applications are rolled out, firewall rules are far simpler to manage with NSX automated deployment and policy enforcement. Application compliance can be verified with at-a-glance inspection of traffic flows. High availability for critical application services like load balancers and firewalls enable continuous application delivery. With Developer-Ready Infrastructure, even the most complex scenarios are easier to maintain and operate.

A number of customers already run Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VMware NSX today. With the recent release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.10, aided by a new feature called Isolation Segments, customers can segregate resources for different applications for regulatory, performance, billing or other reasons. NSX Security Groups can be used with Isolation Segments to further strengthen the security posture of these application segments.