Cloud Foundry Summit 2021 is just around the corner! And with that, let’s take a look at VMware Tanzu Application Service—our answer to Cloud Foundry in the enterprise—and how it’s helped corporate customers enter a new era of high availability at scale. Tanzu Application Service has been a great enabler for our corporate customers looking to speed up their digital transformation journeys.
Tanzu Application Service meets the toughest scaling challenges of enterprise-grade containerized workloads
In late March, we announced the 2.11 release of Tanzu Application Service, which introduced new features that simplify application deployment and management across clouds at scale.
As we continue providing enterprise-grade support for production apps, we’re fully committed to evolving the platform to deliver even better outcomes. After all, the roadmap for “cf push” at VMware is all about making greater strides in key areas:
- Developer productivity
- Operational scalability
- Comprehensive security
- Multi-cloud success
- Plus best-in-class Windows and .NET experiences
As microservices architectures enable enterprises to achieve new-found scale, e-commerce makes “zero downtime” a business imperative. With over a million containers in production, many of the world’s largest businesses trust Tanzu Application Service to continuously deliver and run their apps both on-premises and across public/private clouds.
But don’t just take our word for it. Some of our most important customers are telling their stories about the many ways that Tanzu Application Service helped them supercharge their digital transformation journeys:
- Albertsons successfully handled a 10x surge in traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- DICK’S Sporting Goods increased its path to digital transformation from pure brick-and-mortar to an omnichannel retail business.
- Yapi Kredi delivered a high-quality digital banking experience to its customers, just in time to handle the demand surge during COVID-19.
Albertsons handled 10x traffic with zero downtime
Albertsons is the second-largest grocery chain in the U.S., with more than 2,200 stores nationwide. As part of a large-scale digital transformation initiative kicked off in 2018, its technology team partnered with VMware Tanzu Labs—known then as Pivotal Labs—to modernize its legacy apps. To effectively move their legacy, on-premises system to a microservices-based e-commerce platform on Microsoft Azure, Albertsons chose Tanzu Application Service.
The results were immediately evident, and lasted throughout the COVID-19-related surge in traffic. Albertsons’ Bhuvan Padakanti shared details at SpringOne 2020 of how Tanzu Application Service enabled the company to scale and meet the unprecedented demand surge—an increase of 450 percent—with zero downtime.
Plus, during the initial months of the pandemic, Tanzu Application Service running on Azure gave Albertsons the support they needed:
- More than 100,000 orders per day
- 10x normal e-commerce traffic with zero downtime
- A 39-percent increase in sales
- 700 percent of projected load, which broke all records within the organization
As Padakanti put it at SpringOne, “What [Tanzu Application Service on Azure] has done for us over the past four months…is unprecedented. The kind of order volumes that we saw and the orders we delivered went way beyond anyone’s expectations.”
DICK’S Sporting Goods leaves scalability challenges in its rearview mirror
As one of the largest sporting goods retailers in the U.S., DICK’S Sporting Goods set itself some serious goals to transcend from traditional brick-and-mortar into omnichannel retail. The company tapped VMware Tanzu Labs as its digital transformation partner and used Tanzu Application Service to build customer-centric, cloud native applications.
“Retail happens 24/7. We’re a U.S.-based retailer but there’s a very minimal amount of hours where we’re not receiving a lot of traffic,” says Sean Graham, engineering manager at DICK’S. “You have to have scale, you have to have uptime.”
With the autoscaling feature of Tanzu Application Service, scalability is no longer the challenge it used to be at DICK’S. On top of that, DICK’S needed Tanzu Application Service to run applications on any cloud, anytime, anywhere. As Jay Piskorik, director of platform engineering at DICK’S, noted, “We can move through multiple IaaS—private, GCP, Azure—at any scale,” freeing the retailer’s applications from being locked into any particular cloud or on-premises environment.
Yapi Kredi now delivers exceptional digital banking experiences
The leadership team at Yapi Kredi, the third-largest bank in Turkey, knew it would need to bring new digital experiences to its customers faster than ever before if it wanted to stay relevant amidst the rising fintech market. To achieve this, it chose Tanzu Application Service as its application transformation platform.
“Some time ago, the market was more patient towards crashes and unavailability,” said Taylan Guney, Yapi Kredi’s EVP of software architecture application platforms and cloud. “But today, with the systems getting better and patience levels decreasing, customers expect fast, intuitive apps.”
The company started its digital journey by breaking monolith-based core business systems into microservices and moving them to Tanzu Application Service running on-premises. Its customers were delighted to find new innovations delivered at the speed of business by way of a nimble release cycle. And zero downtime meant no disruptions.
“With VMware Tanzu, we can offer innovations faster and the level of security has also increased as we work together with the local VMware team,” said Guney. “The team worked closely with us during the proof-of-concept period, introduced us to other VMware Tanzu customers, and shared their valuable expertise with us.”
COVID-19 also tested the bank’s scale as the number of users accessing Yapi Kredi’s digital channels increased between 20 and 25 percent. However, the pivot to Tanzu Application Service enabled seamless scaling to meet the increased demand.
VMware and Cloud Foundry Foundation make a dynamic duo
Over the past year, VMware has been actively involved with the Cloud Foundry Foundation on various fronts, and these stories are a testament to that. We’ve actively engaged in the development of the new CFF technical governance structure, which lists transparency and the inclusiveness of community activity among its most important goals.
We’ve also continued to lead and contribute within the previous governance structure, including the Cloud Foundry App Runtime Project Management Committee and many of its projects, the BOSH and Paketo projects, as well as several extension projects.
We’ve also led the development of new Cloud Foundry features, including support for HTTP/2 routing and the creation of a new Cloud Foundry developer role, the space application supporter.
We continue to lead discussions in the ecosystem to bring the proven Cloud Foundry developer experience to the world of Kubernetes.
And all that goes without mentioning that we’ve been collaborating with the open source community and Cloud Foundry members on the Cloud Foundry experience on Kubernetes. We’ve also been working with CFF to complete the initial GA release of the Bionic stemcell line, which will enable it to lead the line’s ongoing development.
It’s been a busy and productive year, and we’re excited to celebrate the community and usher in another year of successful collaboration at Cloud Foundry Summit.
Check out our booth
Be sure to visit our virtual VMware booth at the CF Summit to learn how organizations like yours are shipping code to production more often with Cloud Foundry and Tanzu Application Service. Follow @vmwaretanzu on Twitter for the latest happenings at the conference.
