We are happy to announce the General Availability of VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad version 2.1.2 as of 17th November 2022.
As companies rapidly adopt container technology to run their application for the obvious benefits it offers. With VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad (ALP), Cloud Providers can offer pre-curated secure Bitnami Applications from VMware Marketplace, custom and 3rd party applications for their tenants. This helps users, easily consume applications without having to worry about the underlying endpoint security as well as the associated management of the infrastructure as these applications are pre-architected, tested, and validated.
In the previous version, we offered updates to support ALP with application portfolio management and diagnosis tooling as well as introduced the TKG support – allowing deployment of native K8s clusters using VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension (CSE) up to version 3.1.3.
What’s new with 2.1.2?
With this release, we are delivering two new features for our Cloud Providers and tenants to focus on delivering innovative applications by providing the most up-to-date developer tools and simplified container infrastructure in a secure environment. All enable quick prototyping builds and a faster path to deploy applications in production environments
- ALP now supports the latest version of the VMware Cloud Director Container Service Extension (CSE) – version 4.0. With this, the users can now deploy and provision K8s clusters based on the latest Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (standard runtime) using CSE 4.0.
- ALP supports Helm charts from VMware Application Catalog (VAC). This significantly eases the effort that is expended by developers getting open-source components into one environment, as VAC (https://marketplace.cloud.vmware.com/applicationcatalog?browse-applications) delivers software from the Bitnami collection, but critically production-ready tested, validated and secure software, unlike the raw Bitnami collection. Find out more about VAC in this Feature Friday. Components delivered from VAC are continuously maintained and verifiably tested for their use in production environments. This feature delivers a boost in developer productivity and agility of pre-packaged apps and components while enabling them to meet the stringent security and transparency requirements of enterprise IT.
This release allows Cloud Providers to import VAC helm repositories into App launchpad and publish it to their tenants. Users can then deploy these on to their K8s clusters as required.
Next, how to upgrade?
Users can perform an in-place upgrade to ALP 2.1.2 from versions 2.x. For more details please refer to the procedure here
For more information, you may refer to the Release notes and Documentation page. You can download the latest version of the product here.
Also, do connect with us via our dedicated Slack channel and we’d be happy to respond to your queries and feedback. Please email us for access to the VMware Cloud Provider slack channel if you are not a member yet.
