A Developer’s Guide to VMware Application Catalogs – VMware Cloud Community

Over the years, VMware has built vital products for our vibrant user base – from Developers, DevOps users, IT Admins & Cloud Admins to Security Admins & Database Admins. Our customers use VMware products, in conjunction with a wide array of open-source and third-party tools, to create and maintain modern, future-ready applications that form the building blocks of today’s global business world – on any cloud and any device.

VMware took a further step towards this goal with the acquisition of Bitnami, the industry’s leading open-source application packager, in 2019. Combining Bitnami’s open-source catalog, with thousands of first-party and third-party solutions, VMware offers a ready-to-use ecosystem of solutions for developers and other users through the VMware Marketplace.

What is VMware Marketplace?

The VMware Marketplace enables customers to discover and deploy validated third-party software as well as open-source solutions to various VMware endpoints. With this rich catalog of over 2,000 applications and app building blocks, users can tap into the full ecosystem available to them – no matter which VMware product they use.

There are three types of listings that developers can access through the VMware Marketplace:

• For-purchase solutions, that enable you to find and buy compatible third-party solutions from VMware Marketplace
• List-only solutions, that enable you to discover compatible third-party software, and
• Bring-you-own-license (BYOL) solutions, that enable you to directly deploy open-source or third-party solutions on a VMware platform

The Marketplace catalog extends across all popular software categories (such as storage, security, and analytics) and across a breadth of content types (such as virtual machines, containers, and content packs).  It enables our rich user base of developers, DevOps users, IT administrators, cloud administrators, database admins and others to find solutions for their specific needs.

VMware Marketplace is free to browse and free to sign-up; only the use of paid solutions would require a purchase on the Marketplace or with the partner.

For users that access VMware products through cloud providers, the Bitnami-powered VMware Marketplace open-source solutions are available for direct use in the developers’ application catalog through the VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad. This allows our cloud providers to empower their users with our ready-to-use, validated, open-source catalog for quick application development.

For example, read our case study with VCPP partner Netalia to understand how the VMware Marketplace catalog greatly improves productivity for large-scale business operations.

How can you use VMware Marketplace?

For developers on VMware environments, there are a couple of key scenarios where VMware Marketplace would be highly useful.

1. Building VM-based applications through open-source developer stacks

While creating applications based on virtual machines, developers require common developer stacks to quickly put the project together without manually configuring and building out the entire infrastructure. In such scenarios, developers regularly use open-source development stacks such as MEAN and LAMP, as well as logging and monitoring solutions like ELK Stack, and other supporting applications.. The VMware Marketplace catalog includes all of Bitnami’s vSphere-compatible open-source developer stacks, available for download or for direct deployment into VMware environments. Interested to see how this works? Check out this tutorial video for deploying the LAMP stack on VMware Marketplace directly to VMware environments:

2. Incorporating application support services

Applications are of course built on the stacks discussed above as well as other open-source components such as databases and core services. But in order to work most efficiently, they also require messaging capability, commerce functionality and other supporting business tools. With VMware Marketplace, developers can quickly pick up and deploy support services such as Discourse, phpBB and more.

An Enterprise-Ready Application Catalog for Kubernetes

Bitnami’s library of pre-packaged containers and Helm charts is one of the most popular ways for developers to prototype and build custom applications on Kubernetes. Modern cloud-native applications consist of a combination of services written by developers and supporting open-source services like databases, caching, message queueing, and more. Bitnami’s library is used so widely because it is the easiest way for developers to get started with any Kubernetes platform, and because it is always up-to-date and packaged using best practices.

For developers to move their prototypes into production, however, they often must separately build and maintain their own containers for the same open-source components they were using from Bitnami. That’s because enterprise IT security and operations teams have strict requirements around what can be deployed in production environments, and they frequently prohibit deploying pre-packaged software from sources such as Docker Hub where Bitnami apps are typically accessed. This is where Tanzu Application Catalog comes in: it gives developers the same Bitnami experience they know and love, built to be compliant with enterprise security and operations standards.

Developers who work at a company that purchased Tanzu Application Catalog get access to a private catalog of IT-approved containers and Helm charts built and maintained in the same way as Bitnami software, with the additional benefit that they can be used all the way to production. No more re-platforming applications on approved OS images, and no more building and maintaining third party open-source containers by hand or with expensive dedicated CI tooling. For development teams who cannot leverage pre-built open-source containers and Helm charts today, Tanzu Application Catalog is a huge leap forward in efficiency, compliance, and better security.

If you are a developer who uses Bitnami containers and Helm charts for your own projects or in dev environments, while tediously maintaining separate containers and charts for production at work, ask your manager about Tanzu Application Catalog!

Next Steps

Interested in learning more about VMware Marketplace?