VMware Tanzu Platform is a platform as a service geared toward private cloud, according to Nick Kuhn.
“I currently work for VMware Tanzu and we run a a, you know, a platform or platform as a service, uh, you know, geared for private cloud.”
Person
Nick Kuhn
1 episodes · 20 quoted claims
Tanzu Platform is based on the open source Cloud Foundry project, which Nick Kuhn says predates Kubernetes and Docker.
“it's actually based on, um, an open source, uh, project called Cloud Foundry, which is, I think, I mean, it's, you know, predates Kubernetes and Docker.”
Cloud Foundry started around 2011 at VMware before being spun out and becoming an open source project.
“So, you know, 2011 ish is when it kind of started originally out of VMware and spun out and then became part of a open source project.”
Nick Kuhn has worked at VMware Tanzu for about five years and previously spent about 14 years at a large enterprise.
“I've been, uh, at, uh, VMware Tanzu for about five years, uh, and before that, I was at a one of these large enterprises for about 14 years.”
On Tanzu Platform, the platform builds and secures the container for the developer, according to Nick Kuhn.
“the platform's gonna know like the best practices for, uh, it's gonna build a container for the developer, so the developer doesn't have to worry about, like, you know, securing the container or anything like that.”
The Java buildpack handles JVM memory calculation, the JDK and certificates to create a best-practice container for Java apps.
“So the Java buildpack knows to do all the JVM memory calculators and do the JDK and the certificates and all everything.”
Tanzu's agent approach lets users run cf push on an agent defined by a human-readable agents.md file instead of compiled code.
“we're gonna have this agent, we're gonna just cf push an agent. And instead of, like, you know, machine readable code, we have a human readable language, uh, the agent SMD.”
VMware Tanzu provides an agent harness called the Tanzu Agent Buildpack.
“we are providing a harness, uh, called the, uh, Tanzu Agent Build pack, and that helps through that process.”
Nick Kuhn says Broadcom's approved way for its developers to use MCP servers is to deploy them on Tanzu Platform.
“even at Broadcom, like, the only way approved way to use for our developers is to deploy MCP servers on on Tanzu platform.”
Nick Kuhn presented a five-phase agent demo at VMware Explorer in Las Vegas.
“I was in, I was in Las Vegas for a conference, VMware Explorer, and I had like a five phase demo where I walked through this.”
In Nick Kuhn's demo, a webhook from a GitHub repository issue triggers a Tanzu agent to perform a security review.
“I can hook up, hook them up to a repo with like an event listener or webhook and say, all right. Now. Do a sig like a, you know, issue five on my repo.”
Tanzu Platform's container runtime blocks apps from communicating with each other or the internet unless enabled, per Nick Kuhn.
“they can't talk to each other unless you enable them, so they can't go to the internet unless it's enabled.”
An MCP gateway registers MCP servers and controls which servers and tools an agent can access.
“you basically register MCP servers to this gateway and the gateway kind of controls access, so to speak, and regulates that.”
Nick Kuhn says user credentials should pass through the MCP gateway to servers like GitHub's rather than using one generic service account.
“I don't want it just to be like, well, here's our general generic service account for the entire organization.”
Routing agent traffic through an MCP gateway produces metrics on tool calls and events, according to Nick Kuhn.
“because it's all flowing through that gateway, we get metrics out of it. So we can see all the tool calls and all the all the events happening”
Nick Kuhn says agents or LLMs far from the microservices they call add network latency, so enterprises prefer co-locating them.
“if you have, you know, the agent or the LLM or whatever that's like, you know, 30 hops away from the at the microservice, it's trying to call it.”
Nick Kuhn's first job was on a warehouse inventory system for a large US grocery retailer, built from C and shell scripts on Unix.
“the app was older than me at the time, still older than me.”
In the incident Nick Kuhn described, agents reached an Artifactory instance that had internet access, which he called the weak link.
“then then it got to the artifactory, which then it found the weak link, and the artifactory had the internet access”
Nick Kuhn said social media posts after someone left Anthropic expressed fears that AI could harm humanity.
“somebody left Anthropic, and a bunch of Anthropic people started posting around that.”
At VMware Explorer, nearly every attendee raised a hand when asked if they used tools like Cursor or Claude Code at work.
“And pretty much the entire room, and all of them went up, and I was like, Well, that's a lot more than I expected.”