Highlights from #VMwareExplore; Backstage/DX/platform engineering checkin; new IaaS+PaaS MQ; learning from Twitter

There was a lot going on at VMware Explore Europe last week, so we focus in on the Tanzu related stuff. Then: we do our usual check-in on platform engineering; a brief magic quadrant tour; see if there's any lessons to learn from Twitter the company; and close out discussing VMware's recent open source supply chain survey.

• VMware Explore EU:
  • Cindy's round-up.
  • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1 - including support for Oracle Cloud.
  • Tanzu Mission Control - getting air gap stuff working (not out yet?).
  • Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced - roadmap announcements about: auto-discovering kubernetes and VM things; integrating with TAP to do security policy stuff; adding in running config stuff out of git (for, you know, GitOps).
  • Aria Graph, GA (previewed/announced in US): "Today at VMware Explore Europe, VMware is announcing the availability of a new freemium offering of VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph. This new free tier offering enables customers to inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two of their native public cloud accounts in either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure."
  • More stuff: Bitnami updates, sovereign cloud stuff (working with partners to stand-up Tanzu in regional clouds).
  • Hear Ben’s talk from Explore EU -  “Tutorial: Introduction to VMware Tanzu Application Platform
• Big Backstage Feels:
  • RedHat joins. 
  • Coté's interview with The Frontside. 
  • Our always good Gartner paper on internal developer platforms, free to read. 
  • Also, more hammering away at "platform engineering."
  • The CNCF’s Platforms Working Group are trying to define what a platform would include - details here.
  • We're past the "DevOps is Dead" phase, which is nice.
  • I think we can say "Developer Experience" without feeling dorky too. Even "DX."
• New public cloud MQ, for IaaS+PaaS. Rank (first to last): AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Oracle, IBM, Tencent, Huawei.
• Transforming Twitter:
  • Finally, an example of the "pathological" column in the Westerum table.
  • Clearly Elon’s not a fan of Microservice Architectures - some weird monolith/microservices/de-platform stuff to observe.
  • In the context of the DevOps/cloud native community - planning for a potential loss of the place to talk.
  • Mastodon growing: 
    • Coté in Mastodon: @[email protected].
  • Interesting thoughts from David Heinemeier on the layoffs
• State Of Supply Chain Survey
  • Devs go faster and are more productive with supply chains
  • New tools: Tanzu Image Builder - for packaging your OSS for enterprise use (amongst other things)

Coté did a little video on the study. Check out that Sam Elliott 'stach!