VMware Tanzu Platform is an application development and deployment platform that helps you to modernize your applications and infrastructure to continuously deliver better software to production. Tanzu Platform allows platform engineers to containerize workloads to run on premises with vSphere, while increasing security and manageability. It allows developers to access the resources they need to build modern applications and push them to production. It also provides business analytics and policies that help you keep your applications and the underlying resources as healthy as possible. Tanzu Platform also incorporates policies to govern, keep safe, and secure your infrastructure and applications.

Tanzu Platform is available as a self-managed installation that you deploy and manage in your own data center, or as a software as a service (SaaS) offering hosted by Tanzu Platform cloud services. This version of the documentation describes Tanzu Platform Self-Managed. If you are using Tanzu Platform SaaS, see the Tanzu Platform SaaS documentation.

Tanzu Platform provides everything that you need to build application development environments, develop applications, and push those applications to production quickly, consistently, and securely.

Choice of application runtime

Tanzu Platform allows you to build and deploy applications directly in the Tanzu Platform UI by providing pipelines that get your apps into production on the runtime of your choice:

• Cloud Foundry: Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry allows platform engineers to build public and private clouds with VMware’s implementation of the Cloud Foundry open source project. App developers and operators develop, deploy, and manage apps on those clouds. You can attach your Cloud Foundry environment to Tanzu Platform, and monitor its infrastructure and running applications from the Tanzu Platform UI.
• Kubernetes: Tanzu Platform provides a Kubernetes runtime that is exposed by the Tanzu Platform UI and the Tanzu CLI. It helps platform engineers to build conformant and replicable Kubernetes environments, and DevOps engineers to push applications into production, both in the Tanzu Platform UI and with the Tanzu CLI.

Application discovery and management in the Tanzu Platform UI

Tanzu Platform provides a unified UI that allows you to constantly monitor and manage your development environments and running applications by collecting data from across your Tanzu services and other infrastructure. By unifying this data, Tanzu Platform provides visibility into the resources running on your infrastructure, including the applications that are running on that infrastructure. The Tanzu Platform UI automates the process for discovering existing applications and gives you the tools to refine them and monitor their status.

You add accounts in Tanzu Platform for your vSphere infrastructure so that Tanzu Platform can collect data from those systems. Tanzu Platform can then manage your discovered resources both uniquely within the Tanzu Platform UI and through integrations with other VMware Tanzu services. When you work with resources or applications in the Tanzu Platform UI, you see the relevant resource consumption and applications, and business information provided by the integrated services.

An application is a collection of business-defined resources and services that operates as a business application. It is not the software or code that makes up a software application. Tanzu Platform discovers applications using the application discovery service. The service analyzes resource metadata, such as tags and properties, to identify clusters of resources. You can add or remove resources from discovered applications and respond if Tanzu Platform indicates that your attention is needed.

Many of the functions of the Tanzu Platform UI can also be achieved with the Tanzu CLI. The Tanzu CLI is a command-line tool that connects you to Tanzu Platform, to allow you to build, manage, and deploy your and apps and infrastructure from the command line and in scripts, instead of from the UI.

Tanzu Intelligent Assist

The Tanzu Platform UI includes Tanzu Intelligent Assist, an AI-based tool that helps you to find your way around Tanzu Platform, that can even perform tasks on your behalf.

Optimized for Tanzu Spring

Tanzu Platform provides an application development framework with VMware Tanzu Spring. Tanzu Spring adds to the value that the open source Spring app development ecosystem provides. Integrations with Tanzu Platform allow you to quickly and easily deploy Tanzu Spring apps to production. Tanzu Platform is optimized for Tanzu Spring application discovery, management, and deployment. It implements DevOps best practices, so that you can easily and consistently deploy Tanzu Spring apps to production.

Automated configuration management and compliance enforcement

Tanzu Platform integrates VMware Tanzu Salt. Tanzu Salt helps platform engineers and DevOps teams to create an automated, event-driven configuration management system so that they can rapidly deploy and configure virtual machines, servers, containers, clusters, and network devices on any public cloud or on-premises network, at any scale. Tanzu Platform performs not only security scanning, but can also automatically remediate discovered vulnerabilities, according to the criteria that you specify. Tanzu Salt has a separate UI, which you access from the Tanzu Platform UI.

You can define and apply policies in Tanzu Platform to ensure that your managed resources comply with defined rules or industry benchmarks. Active policies then report findings for violations, threats, and other changes the might negatively impact your business resources.

Curated software catalog

Tanzu Platform includes an implementation of Tanzu Application Catalog, a curated selection of pre-packaged application components with which to extend apps. These components are continuously maintained and verifiably tested for use in production environments.

Database and messaging services

Tanzu Platform includes data services that allow you to provision and use dedicated, on-demand instances of MySQL or Postgres databases with VMware Tanzu for MySQL and VMware Tanzu for Postgres. Tanzu Platform also includes VMware Tanzu for Valkey, a key-value store that you can use as a database, cache, and message broker, and a cloud native message and streaming service with VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ.

All of the Tanzu Platform data services are provided as Tanzu Operations Manager tiles for use with Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry, or as Kubernetes operators for use on any conformant Kubernetes cluster.

What to do first

Go to Install and Run VMware Tanzu Platform Self-Managed, then see Where to begin to learn how to get started with Tanzu Platform after installation.