What exactly is a platform?
Is VMware Tanzu a platform or a suite of products? Is there a difference
I’ve been guilty of loosely using the term platform. However, as public cloud companies have grown into large ecosystems, I’ve come to have a different expectation for what makes a platform. As an example, Salesforce is a platform. Therefore, there’s a pretty solid expectation that I’ll consume the Salesforce backend and some add-ons to create an application.
In preparation for VMWorld, I wanted to refresh my knowledge of VMware Tanzu. I casually dip in and out of Kubernetes, and I remember Tanzu as VMware’s Kubernetes distribution. However, the brand has morphed into what VMware is calling its application platform.
VMware has taken some pretty decent software assets and placed them around the core Kubernetes distribution and called it Tanzu. So, for example, you can get what was Wavefront as one of the Tanzu add-ons. I’m all for naming standards and a consistent brand. However, does that equate to a platform akin to Salesforce?
If I adopted the former Wavefront branded solution separately from the core K8s distribution, have I embraced the Tanzu platform?
I intuitively get Salesforce as a platform. I don’t think I get Tanzu as a platform. At least not in the same way. Honest question, am I thinking of this from the wrong lens?