What’s in the Tanzu Application Service 4.0? With Nick Kuhn

Episode 260 · Tue, 04 Apr 2023 16:36:02 +0200 · 40:44 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, there's a new version of the Tanzu application service coming out, version 4.0. And as always, when there's something Tanzu application service to talk about, we have none other than Nick Taz to come tell us what's going on there. Tell us the interesting new features, what's been happening since last time, the hopes and dreams of the Tanzu application service community. So welcome back, Nick. Well, thank you. And thanks for having me back. And I apparently need to change my name or get a new license plate or something along those lines for Nick Taz. Yeah. But yeah, so the 4.0 release should be coming out here later this month. And there's a lot of things to cover. And just to kind of give everyone a recap, it's going to be kind of the first iteration or new version of our long-term support track program. So a lot of our customers stay on the long-term support release cycle. And, you know, a lot of them will be jump upgrading, so we say, to 4.0. So I think a lot of folks will be very excited about this release and all the features really to kind of unpack here. Yeah, I was just right before this, I was recording another interview with Carrie Schaefer from One Magnify. They're a big Taz user, our Tanzu application service user. And yeah, it was, I was just hearing how, you know, the, as she was saying, the opinionated platform of Taz, the developers love it. It was, it works out well for them. And, uh, we spent a long time, uh, also talking about, uh, how developer happiness is part of your business case, which I, I didn't actually get down to asking her which Excel macro she uses, uh, for developer happiness, but, but, you know, being less snarky, it definitely, uh, was part of, of, uh, platform interest out there. So, so, so let, let's go through it. Like, what are the, what are, what are like, let's say like the top three and maybe we'll

go to more, but like, what are the top three awesomeness features? You could even say Nicktastic features that we have there. Man, I gotta, I gotta get some stickers now or something. Um, but yeah, the, probably the, uh, to go along the lines of developer happiness and kind of the developer experience, uh, kind of the, the biggest new feature, uh, that we're looking at here is the, uh, the introduction of Backstage into TAS, uh, and it's going to be, uh, I think branded the Tanzu application service portal or TAS portal for short. Uh, but essentially, uh, we're bringing some of the goodness that we saw and see with Tanzu application platform into TAS. Um, so, you know, uh, if you're not familiar with Backstage, it's kind of like this open source framework or like kind of big open source project, um, that, you know, it has, has many features in it, but one of the biggest features is kind of like this, I guess you call it like a software catalog or organizational catalog, um, to help organizations kind of keep track of all the different like services within an organization. So you can, you know, deploy an application, register it within this catalog. And then like, you know, your other development teams can say, Hey, let's, what's in the catalog. Oh, it's like, you know, identity service X, Y, Z. Oh, I need that. I can, you know, I can go inspect that identity service and, you know, see, see the, you know, API structure and maybe how I can integrate that into my application without, you know, rewriting that. So it allows for, uh, essentially reuse of, uh, software components and services and kind of helps, uh, you know, better promote, um, you know, kind of cross-functional development within an organization. And some of these organizations that, you know, use our, our products are very big. So anything we can do to help, you know, help kind of coalesce and help things, uh, you know, ease development in any way, shape or form is, is a really big win. Yeah, that, that'll be, that's, that's going to be exciting because I feel like, uh, like

Taz has had maybe like 30 to 40% of that, right? Like you, you have the catalog of like, you know, tiles and services and stuff that you can use. But then the thing I'm always intrigued with, with the, uh, the backstage way of life, so to speak, is that each of the applications or services, each of the developer teams, hopefully there's a developer team. If you have some software you depend on in your organization, but each of the developer teams also has their own, like, I don't even know the backstage terminology, their own page that, that you can go to, right. And the whole, like the whole, like maybe not the whole, but a lot of what backstage is about is making sure all those different teams can easily find each other and start to work with each other and understand the projects that that's there, which kind of to your point, like I always imagine, you know, if you have an organization with like 20, 25,000 developers, it's not like it's easy to find things. Right. So it's good to have that, that built into there. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, backstage put out a blog recently that had some metrics around what they saw when they started using backstage on a more regular basis across their teams. Um, I'll just read you some of the stats here that are picked out two dot three X more active in GitHub. This is a developer. So more active in GitHub as a result of being able to understand the, uh, the systems around them and the, the, the, um, information being generated by the different development teams that are working around them. Um, create two times more code changes in 17% less cycle time. So enables them to speed up and get more, uh, get more code changes done as well. So there's tons and tons of really good stuff in backstage. It sounds really exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing what it looks like in the task platform. Have you seen it, Nick? Uh, yeah. So I've seen a little, little, little bit of it so far and, uh, hopefully later I'll be

releasing, uh, maybe a demo video on it. Uh, but yeah, so I've seen it. It looks, uh, it looks a lot, uh, like what we see in Tainsm application platform, but you know, it's, uh, kind of been, uh, I guess molded per se to, to work within Tainsm application service. And there's also, um, some integrations too, to kind of like, if you're using the backstage component tree and you want to go like into apps manager, which is the traditional, uh, you know, portal for, for tasks, you can kind of go in between as well. So, um, yeah, it looks, uh, looks a lot and, you know, it feels a lot like the, the, the tap, uh, backstage experience. Uh, and, um, you know, we also, um, you, the applications accelerators have been, have been loaded as well within that. So you can start to get some of that, um, kind of golden templated or, you know, best practice, uh, templates for your organization in there as well. Um, to really kind of streamline and maybe even, you know, we see that, you know, you're, I, I, I caught onto like two X improvement. So maybe, you know, who knows what the, the, if we get studies about what the applications accelerators do for, you know, uh, bootstrapping new development or, you know, you know, onboarding new developers within an organization, maybe, maybe in a year or two, we'll have some kind of data around that, but, um, yeah, I think it's, it's, it's going to speak a lot to really just, you know, helping people on board and, you know, kind of making the, um, I guess the best path, the least path of resistance within an organization and, you know, he just, people will just naturally do that. If it's the, you know, if it's the easiest way to do it and it's also the right way, you'll, you'll probably have a lot of adoption. And, uh, you know, I think that's, I think that's a really key, uh, component to kind of key up on as well. Yeah. Cause the term golden path comes up a lot, doesn't it? When you're talking about, uh, backstage, but it, it also always came up a lot when you're talking about TAS, TAS has always had an opinion about the golden path to get to production.

This seems like a, an extension of that extending it beyond the boundaries of TAS. Is it still got that openness where you can include applications from anywhere in your portfolio? It doesn't have to be something that's on TAS. Uh, I, I believe you could still register, uh, uh, a services. I, I, you know, I, I have a catalog. Yeah. And the catalog from pretty much, I guess, anywhere, right. Uh, whatever that has the, um, there's like a, there's like a YAML format, right. To register. That's right. Yeah. So assuming you have that in your repo, I, I said, I assume, you know, it will, it should register, uh, just like any other. Yeah, cool. Exactly. I'm looking forward to seeing that. I can't wait to see your video. Yeah. Well, me too. I have to make it first too, but it'll be thrilling. Get the jazz hands on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very excited about that. Uh, well, so, so what, what's number two on your list there? Like what, uh, number two, uh, let's see. So I guess we'll kind of go into, I can talk about a couple other, um, other features as, as an additional developer productivity. So, uh, the next kind of feature, um, and it's very, this is a feature that's very specific and I kind of really, uh, you know, makes TAS shine within the, you know, even in the current, uh, 20, 23, uh, landscape, uh, as we will. But the, um, integrated windows authentication support for .NET framework applications is now live within TAS 4.0. So, uh, if you're not familiar with what that means, that's essentially, uh, you know, kind of these, like, I guess we call them now legacy .NET framework applications, uh, that are still probably running on, you know, windows servers, uh, but they, they make use of the, uh, you know, integrated windows authentication for, you know, authentication to the app. Those can actually now migrate into TAS and not be blocked because the, uh, some of the

build pack processes and things before actually didn't support that IWA protocol, but now that's been changed that we can allow that. So kind of that last bastion of kind of .NET framework apps that were kind of stuck on potentially, you know, legacy application servers that still needed, you know, patched and rebooted every month and, you know, not a lot of automation around that process. Any of those apps can move into the platform now. And, um, if you're a .NET shop or .NET framework shop, uh, there's a lot of value, um, you know, in migrating and you could potentially save a lot of time savings, um, just from the developer and kind of, uh, platform engineering perspective of migrating this to a modern platform and kind of getting your journey, you know, getting out of the days of kind of the legacy app server, uh, situation. And there's not a lot of things, you know, in the market that can run .NET framework applications in any kind of cloud native way. So that's something very unique to, um, so that's something to, uh, keep an eye on. Not everybody has .NET framework applications, but if you do, uh, I would, uh, definitely check this out and see maybe where, uh, it can help, uh, potentially, uh, improve some of your processes. Yeah. And this is because it's got actual windows OS containers in there, hasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So like, so you're not building off a Linux base, you're building off a windows base. And it sounds like the last part of that was the identity management piece. And that's now, you can now integrate that well into those containers. So that sounds fantastic. Especially like you said, if you're a .NET shop, you're a Microsoft, uh, you know, a lot of folks that we talk to using Microsoft all the time and very interested in framework support, you know, full framework support. So that sounds really cool. Yeah. So, yeah. And then just to, to kind of add onto that, if you're not familiar with it, Taz has a container scheduler called Diego and it can run a, a full Linux Diego stack and a full, you know, windows server stack as well. So it does. Yeah. So it's in parallel can support both Linux and, you know, traditional windows server workloads

as well. Yeah. And it can send apps in the correct direction, can't it? It can, you know, it knows the windows. Apps are going over to this particular cell, the, uh, the Linux apps going in a different direction. Exactly. So it's a good, good, you know, it's good for tying everything together, isn't it? You don't have to feel excluded because of your, um, windows, uh, uh, investments. You know, you can keep making those windows investments and still have them relevant in a cloud native environment, which is good. Exactly. Exactly. Uh, let's see one more, I'll pick a couple more little small features, not necessarily small features, but, um, features within the continued developer, uh, productivity front. Um, so we're, we're starting to see, um, introduction of cloud native build packs. So they're kind of like the next generation of build packs. Um, so history lesson, uh, the TAS build packs are known really kind of as the cloud foundry or V2 versions of build packs. And then cloud native build packs came along, which is kind of like the V3 variant. So now we're, uh, we're actually adding cloud native build packs into TAS as well, in addition to their already, you know, in the already existing build packs. So, um, there's been a lot of, uh, work being done to kind of adopt the cloud native build packs and, and kind of introduce them into TAS. This is, you know, the, the kind of goal of this is to continue to, you know, uh, add additional support for different, you know, languages or, or configurations and, you know, just to kind of stay, stay up the, up to the speed with all the different build pack technology. And I think the first build pack we'll see in 4.0 or the cloud native build pack we'll see is the, the web servers type build pack. Um, but you know, as things progress, like kind of the framework's been built to add, hopefully quickly add more, uh, different, you know, different cloud native build packs as well. And, you know, subsequent releases. So just kind of keep, stay tuned there. And in addition to that, the, um, the CF Linux FS4. Stacks are, are ready now as well.

So another, you know, another kind of big variant there is, uh, what base OS, the, um, the platform uses for the container operating system. And, um, we're just revving that to the next, you know, essentially the next version of Linux OS, which I believe that is, I think that's still based on Ubuntu jammy as well. And Linux FS4. Um, jammy for the win. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, just again, seeing that, uh, developers not having to worry about, you know, building container images and it's just, you know, you kind of push your code up to the platform and everything's happy there. Now, now, you know, maybe what's the difference? You know, we had the two types of build packs. What's the difference between those two? So, um, so the V2 or the Cloud Foundry build packs are kind of, um, let's just say the default build packs have shipped with TAS for quite some time and the cloud native build packs, uh, were kind of introduced and you've seen, um, cause so cloud native build packs and Ben, correct me if I'm wrong here. Cause I think you probably know some about this too, but, uh, are really kind of like a, a, a new spec for build packs. And like an implementation of cloud native build packs are known as, uh, Paquetto build packs, which is another kind of open source project, um, that, you know, VMware sponsors. And I believe the Paquetto build packs are actually assigned us associated with the Cloud Foundry foundation too. Uh, but that's just, you know, a new, new kind of take a new iteration of these build packs. Um, so we kind of see this V2 and V3 variant. And I believe if we look at Tanzu application platform, a lot of the build packs based in, and TAP are, uh, off cloud native build packs as well. So, right. Yeah, that's right. So as a developer, you probably won't notice any difference. You'll still do a CF push in the same way you always did. You'll still get a build pack selected based on the source code that you've asked it to build. So it still has a detect feature and it's still going to detect your source code and then pick

the appropriate stack to build underneath that source code into a container. There's a hardened container based on Jammy as, uh, as Nick was saying. But I think the difference in terms of, if you watch the log, if you watch the log of these two things, I think probably the thing that you'll notice that feels slightly different is just the amount of granularity that's available in the version three is, I think it's higher. It feels higher. When you look at the logs, it's selecting more details. It's detecting more details about what's actually in the source code and then building layers based on those details. That's how it feels to me. But in terms of the end product, the end product is perfectly compliant container runs first time runs your app. You don't have to worry about build packs. Sorry. You don't have to worry about Docker files at all. So you don't have to sort of go into the details of how it's constructed. You just say, here's my source code, build it into a container. The build pack will get on with that. Whether it's a cloud native build pack in version three or a version two, it still works in the same way. It's just, like I said, there's just a few differences in the specification and the way that it's, that it's actually built out that you might notice the difference if you're going through the logs, but if you don't, you don't want to know, you probably don't need to know. Yeah. And, and it's with this release, it sounds like you'll be assured there's jam in it. So yeah, plenty of jam. All good servers run jam. My server at home is running jam. So yeah. Okay. Another great sticker idea here. That reminds me of the phenomena where, uh, where, you know, in the eighties, kids would put like oatmeal and jam and VCRs, like, you know, loaded up with jam. I remember that. I remember space, I remember space balls where there was jamming that went on. We've been jammed. Yeah. And then they like, like lick it off the satellite and like it's raspberry, right? Or so that, I don't know. But yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's a, that's a good movie. We've gone. I think that possibly dates me.

I heard about it once. Maybe that's what I should say. Everybody wants, uh, had this in. Uh, well, what else do we have going on in 4.0? Yeah. How do we, uh, transition out of the jam here? Okay. Um, get out of a jam. Yeah, exactly. I guess, uh, take off my, uh, developer hat, put on my platform engineer hat. Uh, let's see here. Um, so there's a lot of features around. Does that look like a yellow hard hat? That one is that like, that's probably how it is. Isn't it? I don't, I don't, has the community, uh, coalesced on the, um, the, um, the hat. I think it's a construction hat. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Putting your, putting your construction hats on. What do you see? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, so let's see. So there's, um, some features around, um, let's say custom app metric rate limiting. So, uh, so developers can, can make custom, um, metrics that emit out of their applications. And some of those could be quite noisy. So now, um, there are, uh, abilities to set kind of global limits and kind of, uh, kind of regulate that, that, uh, those metrics. So that we don't, we don't potentially get an overflow situation. So that, that's going to be pretty useful for the, the platform engineers of the house to any, any kind of tool or, uh, uh, uh, you know, thing that can, uh, gauge that they can do to, uh, either, you know, kind of control the flow or prevent an overflow, especially anything around logging or metrics, uh, they'll know that it's pretty, pretty well appreciated, uh, to, to help kind of prevent, um, any kind of, uh, over overflow within, within that system. So that's one. Why don't, why don't children come with this feature? That's what I, well, you just turn them down a little bit. Like, I want to control the flow just a little bit. Is that like a questions per minute type thing? Only one?

Why, why, why yeah, if we invented that, I think we'd be in a whole different business then, but, uh, uh, so, uh, moving on, um, the platform now supports, uh, open, uh, IDC provider support. So in addition to like SAML and LDAP, you can use, uh, OIDC to provide authentication into the system. So, I mean, that's just another, uh, you know, authentication provider that a lot of, uh, folks are moving to. So that's just helping platform engineers, uh, you know, kind of stay, uh, keep their authentication into the latest, uh, format. And that's typically tied into like a, uh, SSO or enterprise SSO type thing. So making it easier for people to, you know, authenticate into the system and, you know, less, less iterations, uh, going through a password, you know, username, password type thing. I think, I think every time we, uh, catch up on the latest, uh, Taz stuff with you, there's like new authentication integrations. I mean, of course, right? Cause that's, uh, you, you need that. Like, uh, and, and, uh, as, uh, as, uh, as it gets used more and more, you encounter the more thrilling and even exotic authentication systems that you wouldn't think to integrate with initially. Yeah, well, well, I'm sure we'll come up with something next for sure, but, um, let's see, there's a, there's been a playbook has been built to help with the CF Linux FS3 and FS4 migration, as we kind of talked about before in the additional, um, uh, uh, stacks offered within the platform. So helping, uh, platform engineers kind of to, to get, to get to that, that experience and some tooling built around that to help as well. There was a migration going from two to three, kind of a few years back. And we've, you know, tried to introduce more tooling and more help for this upcoming migration. Um, because of stuff like, I don't know, container D changes or is it, is it that sort of stuff

you mean, this thing, this thing that are in the base image that perhaps, uh, yeah, it's just, it's just base image changing. There's, you know, potential things about, you know, like you essentially have to, um, restage the application to go to the new stack. Yeah. And sometimes it's just weird, you know, your base OS is updating. So there might be a weird, you know, compiler thing or like a slight difference on how like, like Python works or PHP works. So just, uh, you know, 99% of the time, everything will be fine. But there's like these weird, you know, offlier cases that people need to, you know, just be aware of and, uh, you know, make sure, you know, you're, you're, you're kind of paying attention to these type of things. It's good. It's always good to know that there's a, there's a chance, but it's also good to know that it's a small chances and a small number of cases, you might need something like a, like this guide, but in majority of cases you don't. Well, I think too, and it's, it may seem like, you know, for folks not familiar with, with the product that like, why are we talking about this? But I mean, the, the platform's been around for over a decade now. So like, we've had to deal with like operating systems going out end of life and like going to the next version and like, you know, like it's been around, it's very mature. So there's definitely operational procedures about, you know, just, you know, Hey, we, you know, we have to go to this next version because what we started on is not, you know, it's end of support. So we got to go to the next version versus, you know, some of these newer things haven't been around long enough to, to deal with that yet. So I guess it's just, it is what it is, right? Yeah. And I said, like, if you're, if you're running a Linux desktop, like I am, then, you know, with Ubuntu every two years, you, you got to expect an upgrade cycle is sometimes something in that upgrade cycle that you have to contend with. You have to, you know, think about and maybe change the way that you do a few things, but it's part and parcel of the continuing innovation that's going on in that space.

It's really, you just have to, yeah, go along with the ride, I think. Yeah, exactly. So some more iterations here, we're going to kind of go down into the Tansu operations manager space, but that's kind of, you know, one of the key mechanisms for, you know, managing and deploying Tansu application service. It's kind of our appliance package version of Bosch and all of those things. But the, so the Tansu operations manager is, is declaring long-term support in kind of tandem with TAS. So, so the operations manager 3.0.5 is like going to be kind of paired with this 4.0 release. So, you know, these, these kind of variants will stay in the long-term support track as, you know, as needed. And, you know, you know, you don't really get TAS without ops manager. So having them kind of be more lockstep makes sense from a release cycle. And another really kind of big note we're talking about here with, with platform engineers is certificates. And we've done a lot of work in the past releases to help make certificates, you know, easier with the platform. The platform has a lot of kind of bundled managed certificates because we're doing a lot of different things with VMs, with containers, you know, load balancing, all these different things all require certificates. But we're trying to make this process less, you know, less painful throughout every release. And with this, this, this kind of new release here, we're seeing the ability to automatically rotate the non-configurable lease certificate, or that's really kind of like the, the bottom tiered certificates that are like the most need, need to be rotated the most often, right? Because, you know, I don't think, I've never heard anyone, you know, in the IT industry really talk fondly about certificates, but it's just something, you know, we have to, we have to deal with certificates in order to really kind of operate. So these certificates now, when an operator goes to hit apply changes or really kind of push

a change to the platform, you can check to say, hey, automatically go and rotate these non-configurable lease certificates as well. So that's going to just, you know, help people to like, all right, I'm already pushing a change. I'm going to do that too, just to make sure these certificates have been rotated to save a whole lot of time. Because beforehand they'd have to do some kind of like out of band process to, to get these, these certificates rotated. And now just, you know, having that appear within the, the, the kind of the portal and say, you know, checkbox, rotate certs should hopefully save a lot of time and, and pain. Because these are, these are the certificates that are rotated the most often. So I think that's the thing with reliability, isn't it? It's so reliable. You can leave it for a long time. And if you do that, there's more of a chance that you'll hit one of the certificate issues because time will catch up with you from the certificates point of view, even though the app is perfectly fine. So it's having that ability to sort of do it as part of other maintenance tasks that kind of staves off that date from ever coming to so close that it becomes a problem for you. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So then, so as time goes on, like, you know, you think that four year life cycle of that, you know, certificate authority is going to be fine. But then when you're, you know, close to four years, like, well, I need to rotate that. It's been, you know, four years. So things like that, you know, we've had to deal with. And then it seems like the kind of the security trend is to make the, the acceptable lease duration of certificates shorter and shorter and shorter. And I think I even saw something on Twitter the other day that was like, we're going to make them like a month or something, or like three months, like server certificates are going to go down from one year to three months. I was like, well, this person's clearly never worked in enterprise IT because having to everything rotate us, you know, at minimum or at maximum of three months, a life cycle would be, that'd be a lot. But yeah, with 10,000 apps or whatever, you're going to be rotating several hundred times a

day on you. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be, you're going to hack yourself. Yeah. That's what's going to happen. Service on yourself, but too many rotations. So the certificates rotate every, every minute or something. I don't know. But yeah. So yeah, I mean, that's just, you know, you know, rotating your certificates is kind of like taking out the trash. Nobody really wants to do it. And you're not going to get a big promotion or anything, but if you don't take out the trash, there will eventually be consequences. Right. So it's just got to get a big demotion. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think you raise a good point that that would be a, uh, that would be a good award, like one, like a little, uh, a little acrylic trash bag. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's the award you give someone for just like, you know, doing, doing their job well that no one notices. And, uh, you know, cause otherwise you would have too many trash bags. Just, you get you, the, this month you get to taking out the trash award. Yeah. We appreciate it. Thank you for not letting our certs expire. That's right. Well, like, like, so I think that's, uh, as, as with every TAS version, there's a whole bunch of features and smaller things as well. Are there any, like, like let's pick out, are there any, uh, fascinating or like very small, but interesting developer features that have come out? Like, like what's, what's a, what's a feature that like seems kind of small, but there's, there's a, there's a developer and operations person out there who's like, oh, this is going to save me three keys that I have to push. Yeah. So, so I got, I got a couple that come to mind. Uh, one of them is, um, so when we talk about like blue green deployments, right. And, um, that's a typical like, uh, pattern use within TAS and, and other, you know, kind of cloud native type situations. Right. Uh, but essentially you have two copies of the app and then you do like the kind of routing and flip over when you, when you think that the new version is okay.

And you, you know, you know, you go from green to blue or vice versa. And, uh, you know, if, if there's an issue with a new version of the application, you can roll, roll back to the other one. And, you know, it's, it's the, it's essentially to help roll out, um, new changes of your application, minimizing downtime and minimizing impact of pencil. Like, oops, we rolled out a new version and, uh, whoopsie, uh, we broke something. Maybe it's something that, you know, the, the folks at Twitter can start applying. Uh, but, um, the folks, uh, the, the, um, the, sorry, I tried to pull that off without laughing, but I can, apparently it didn't work out. Um, the, that, that functionality within TAS, uh, has worked, but there is an issue with some of the meta metadata. And when you re re did that blue green, which would instantiate a CF rename, um, that, that name, the name wouldn't quite change in that people would lose apps, uh, logs and metrics within, within, within that blue green flow. And that was actually kind of preventing some folks from doing that because they didn't want to lose logging or metrics when that, that, that, that change hit. So now we, we've updated and fixed that so that when you do a CF rename and part of that blue green kind of flow, the metadata and logs are, are all, they rename as well. So if you, if you're doing like a log stream or, or looking at logs through like, you know, log aggregation system, when you're doing this process, you'll, that, that full name will flow properly and we won't lose logs when we do that, um, that rename process. So it seems a bit, uh, kind of obscure to, you know, if you're not really kind of in deep in the weeds on this, but, uh, for developers, it's, it's an, an engineering, it's, it's a big win because then if, if they want to continue down this path of, you know, using blue green, they don't have to worry about potentially losing logs and metrics when, when this change happens. And, um, especially when you're testing new functionality, losing some logs potentially could be not a good thing. So, um, this is definitely something that I think a lot of folks will be excited about

that, you know, actually have been in use, have been using it and, and, and, um, you know, continue to, to make improvements in that developer workflow there. Well, yeah, yeah. I, I always like log piles, you know, you don't want to lose anything. Especially like you were saying that, uh, uh, you know, around something like releasing, putting a new release out, you want to collect as much about it as possible in case you have to fix it. And if not, not even just right away, but in, in the future. Well, so, you know, how, how can, uh, how, how do people get ahold of this? Remind them of the process for, for getting an upgrade in place. How does that all work out? Uh, an upgrade to Taser application service? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, they can, um, well, a lot of our, uh, you know, tried and true platform engineers will be making use of, uh, platform automation via concourse. And, um, they'll, they'll elect to pull this release from our, uh, beloved TanzuNet and it kind of start propagating that through their systems kind of automagically. But you can go in and manually download that as well at TanzuNet when, when it becomes available and, um, you know, upload it to your, to your, uh, ops manager and click apply changes pretty, pretty easily, you know, pretty, pretty easily that, uh, a whole lot of hoops to go through. Um, is that where the docs will be as well, Nick at network.tanzu.com? Is that right? Oh yeah. So there there'll be with, with, uh, with the actual release, there'll be release notes bundled. Uh, when you go to download it and you can go to within the, there's off to the right hand side, you can go like read the release notes and then you'll, you'll get all this, you know, the actual release that's tied to the, to the release. Um, and if you want to, you know, obviously we have, uh, uh, the Tanzu tech zone site too, which has a lot of focus for, uh, the Tanzu application servers too. So, uh, well, definitely we can keep, uh, keep an eye out for, um, you know, when, when

it, when it becomes GA, uh, I'll be, I'll be talking about it on my social media, uh, platforms. And I believe we will kind of re, uh, rebroadcast this to the world when the GA date launches as well, just to make sure people can go in and get it when it's, you know, fresh off the presses, so to speak as well. Well, we better get your, uh, Twitter handle and Nick, do you want to call it out for our listeners? Yeah, it's, uh, at Taykun, sir, T-H-K-U-H-N-Z. Um, so I'm pretty active on Twitter. I do a little Mastodon and, and LinkedIn as well. So, uh, you can follow me, uh, there. And you're building a heck of a server on, uh, Twitter. I noticed there's a few pages now and again. Yeah. So yeah, I have a, I kind of side, uh, HomeLab project I've been working on and, um, I try to post daily of, uh, part of the hundred days of HomeLab, um, kind of hashtag there. Soon, hopefully I'll be running a Cloud Foundry in my basement or a TANZ application service in my basement. But, um, yeah, maybe I'll make a video about that too. But yeah, I, uh, I've bought a lot of gear and I've, I've gone, uh, over time and over budget. Uh, but it's been fun. I think it sounds like the most expensive Home Automation I've ever heard of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're gonna run, uh, gonna run TAS for five of you in the house. Yeah. It's gonna be a great developer experience. Let me tell you. Uh, yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's fun to have your own cloud in, in your basement. You could call it the, uh, the Nicktastic Cloud. Yeah. Now I need to go register that domain, right? Dot IO. Yeah. Or, or, you know, you could use dot plumbing, dot limo. I didn't, I didn't even know that plumbing was a thing. Oh yeah. Like you can have anything now. Yeah. Just set yourself aside like 45 minutes and go look at all the, uh, top, top level domains. You'll, you'll, it'll be very entertaining. Oh boy. It's the most important thing you'll shop for. Forget about all those switches and yeah.

I'll, I'll, I'll end the day with a hundred new domain names registered to me for, for no apparent reason. Yeah. The, the, the domain, the domain registrar I use, it has this. Uh, it has an option where you can search everything and there's so many of them that like, it takes several minutes for it just to like populate and put all of the possible names in there. It's ridiculous, but oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, uh, as always, it's, it's, it's great to have you on for a, for an update and, and just to remind people there's, there's a regular cadence of releases. So when, like when around, when do you think the next version, uh, when, when is it targeted for on the cadence? Um, so from the, the, the cadence, uh, for Taz, we aimed it to release, uh, twice a year. So the, the, the first kind of release is going to be the long-term support track. And then we'll have a release later in the year, which is that, that fast track for folks to what, uh, let's just consume every release, uh, every six months approximately. I think we should call that the fun track. The fun track. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Ben and I, this is, this is the, uh, you know, they call it the golden hour when the sun sets and your photos look good, but this is like the golden hour for marketing, I think is, is what's going on over here. The sun is setting here, but I can't claim to look good. And, uh, talking about releases too, there are a few other kind of ecosystem releases that, uh, are happening too. So, um, uh, just keep your eyes peeled for that. But, uh, one more thing to highlight is that the, uh, my SQL VMware SQL for my SQL, uh, called tile. Uh, um, I'm, I may have butchered the actual official product name there, but the, the, my SQL tile, uh, is, uh, is, uh, revving, uh, to support my SQL 8.0 as well. So yeah, it's going to be a big for folks using that tile and the cloud service broker tiles

for folks who want to use TAS and use cloud native services with the big three hyperscalers. Those are revving as well, kind of out of band of the, the big TAS releases. Uh, but we do have a lot of work in that ecosystem, um, in the TAS overall ecosystem with the tiles, the partner tiles, all kind of revving, um, kind of as fast as they can get releases out to you. So, uh, you know, we have two major releases per year, but then, you know, there's a lot of other ecosystem tiles kind of happening in between and, uh, different things happening there. So everyone just, uh, keep your eye out there and I'll, I'll try to do my best to help, um, kind of highlight those as well, too, to let, uh, make sure folks are knowing about those releases too, as they come out. Yeah. Well, that'll be fun. Yeah. Well, as, as, as we mentioned earlier, uh, you know, I think, I think if you're interested, you will certainly be aware of the, uh, the release some, sometime soon. And, uh, if you're listening to this and you'd like wanted to get, uh, you know, uh, pointers to things, if you go to tanzutalk.com, you can look up this episode and we'll put some links in the show note to it. And, uh, you know, maybe, maybe at some point in our regular recording schedule, Ben, uh, when, when the Nicktastic cloud is fully installed, we can have a, we can have a little after show special and, uh, just, we can, we can do a little retrospective, see what we've learned. Will there be drinks? I'll tell me if there are drinks. Yes. That's right. We can, uh, we can, uh, we can all coalesce in the next green room. Yeah. I think, I think, I think what you got to target is putting it in a backpack. That's all. You always want to have a cloud in a backpack or a platform in a backpack. Booze on a sort of a sucky straw thing. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I think that belongs on a hat, but yes. That's how that's a, that's a platform engineering hard hat to the next extreme, right? Yes. A hard hat with two beers on. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, uh, well, thanks for being on and, uh, thanks for listening.

It was fun and we'll see everyone next time. Bye bye. Thank you.

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