Tanzu Application Service Platform
Background: In early 2020, CEO Pat Gelsinger kicked off the new fiscal year with several big initiatives, one of which was to have VMware be a prominent player in the world of software developers, not just operators. Pat acknowledged that VMware was not a developer-centric company and that needed to change.
My role: Created clear pathways for developers to be able to self-service their own infrastructure for development of their applications. I articulated the workflow (eg, design of screens) for developers to do this.
Design challenge: User experience was not optimized, need for harmony between users and functionality.
Solution: Delivering a complete Kubernetes stack, from infrastructure to application, to help enterprises build, run and manage modern applications with enhanced productivity, security and efficiency.
Outcome: Connect people, structure and applications to the underlying infrastructure. Create simpler workflows for consumers to deploy their applications. Enable customers to configure, secure, and govern their Tanzu platform using Tanzu, VMware and third-party components.
On September 20, 2020 a small 6 person team of design and product leads took a 2 page document script from Raghvender Arni, our COO of GoTo market, and turned it into a North Star, vision-building prototype.
We put this demo together in two weeks and used this artifact as the baseline story-telling device to sell to our field engineering team at our end-of-year sales kick-off on the vision of a developer platform built on Kubernetes.
The demo we created was a success! This effort fuelled the investment to scale our team up and build a new Kubernetes platform for developers. We are now general release as of January 11, 2022, with Tanzu Application Service Platform.
Tanzu Application Platform (TAP)– a set of components that allows application teams to build, deploy and manage on a Kubernetes platform
Features included in GA:
App accelerator: bootstrap new App via templates
Dev tooling
Live-reload & debug tooling optimized for rapid inner loop
App live view for rapid observability
IDE plugins
Supply chain choreographer
Supply chain cartographer (open-source)
Secure tools (sign, scan, store) CLI
Conventions service for platform operators
Services toolkit for service provisioning & binding
Tanzu CLI TAP plugins & their documentation
Self-hosted TAP GUI with initial plugins set (workload visibility)
E2E automated CIpPipelines
Profile-based installation of TAP
TAP unboxing documentation
Learning center (formerly eduk8s) – redesign
OSS – TCE and Backstage – upstream contribution to the core release
Application live view for real-time data
Developer Experience Design Achievements 2021
Delivered experience strategies to improve user and customer outcomes
Roadmap planning strategy workshops: Higher visioning to align the teams with common outcomes and goals
Our prototype Personas evolved to Roles then to Customer Profiles as we learned more in the market our research informed richer data
Design Principles formed! This is how we align design coherence across product teams
Design System: Creation of Clarity Design System of components for Tanzu using an inner source model of contribution
Design Partner Program: 200 customers downloaded our beta and 40 customers engaged with design for direct feedback sessions sessions in the last quarter of 2021
Creation of a rolling study with Tetra insights research platform to engage non-VMware users in one-on-one user interviews