VMware Marketplace Launches Third-Party Commerce Capability

Originally published on VMware Tech Alliance Partners (TAP) Blog

Authored by Ajay Patel

VMware users can now purchase third-party partner solutions from the VMware Marketplace and deploy these solutions directly to VMware endpoints. Plus, we are delighted to announce a host of upcoming VMware Marketplace portfolio capabilities and services that will accelerate our customers’ cloud adoption journeys and our partners’ go-to-market strategies with VMware.

Recent innovations in digitization have had deep impacts in almost every aspect of our life, from food and healthcare to personal finance and manufacturing. Core to this are innovative IT applications that are more intelligent and powerful than ever before. In part, this is fueled by the wide gamut of tools available to build applications, and the breadth available in multi-cloud computing infrastructure to run these applications. Hence, it is vital for organizations across all industries to empower their development and technology teams with access to the most expansive software tool set to build, run and manage these applications. All actors across the stack, from IT Administrators to DevOps Engineers, to Developers, and Business users, need easy and quick access to the tools to innovate quickly, build effectively and manage efficiently.

The need for an accessible ecosystem

At VMware, we seek to empower our users by giving them the ability to choose the right set of tools for their unique goals. We build deep, meaningful partnerships with industry peers to support our customers’ choices across their full technology stacks. We also make the discovery and usage of these partner solutions simpler through the VMware Marketplace. The VMware Marketplace is that one-stop shop – with over 2,100 solutions spanning categories such as security, storage, networking and more, where customers can discover and deploy validated and certified ecosystem solutions for all VMware products.

Discover, try, buy, deploy

Today, we are proud to announce the launch of commercial capabilities on VMware Marketplace – making it the single location to discover, try, purchase, and deploy VMware ecosystem solutions!

We launched the initial phase of our commercial transactability journey with our design partners at Catchpoint, LicenseFortress, and One Convergence.

In future phases, we plan to expand our commerce capabilities to include other forms of payments and offer types including pay by invoice, credit fund based transactions and usage based billing.

Easing our customer’s digital innovation journey

The VMware Marketplace houses a robust catalog of validated and certified artifacts and images that assures users of interoperability with their choice of VMware platform. VMware Marketplace reduces customer consumption friction, through its easy filter / search functionality and an in-product experience with various VMware products (for example, the VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad).

With the addition of commerce, VMware Marketplace further smoothens that customer journey. Users can discover the right ecosystem solution, try it out, purchase it directly if they are satisfied with the trial, and then deploy that file directly to vSphere or other VMware locations – without ever leaving the Marketplace user interface.

And that’s not all

Apart from this keystone commercial capability, we also announced a few exciting forthcoming capabilities at VMworld 2021:

• We plan to launch image building capabilities, that will enable any user – whether a VMware customer or a VMware partner – to provide us with code or a package that we can build, package, verify, customize, and publish for them in the format of their choice and deployable on the platform of their choice.
• We plan to enable deployments of solutions directly from VMware Marketplace to native cloud endpoints such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform by packaging solutions in the applicable formats (for example, Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for AWS).
• We intend to launch VMware Application Catalog that expands on the capability of Tanzu Application Catalog and enables curation and customization of VM-based images in addition to container images supported today.

Together, these changes will provide our customers with the ability to create a curated catalog of open source, ISV content and their own private images that are compatible with the cloud of their choice.

Next steps

If you are a VMware ecosystem partner and would like to enable sales of your solution through VMware Marketplace, please contact us at VMwareMarketplace@vmware.com.

If you would like to publish a paid listing on VMware Marketplace, please contact us at VMwareMarketplace@vmware.com. If you’d like to start purchasing through VMware Marketplace, head to our catalog page! To learn more about VMware Marketplace, please visit our webpage.

VMware Joins Docker Verified Publisher Program with its Bitnami, Tanzu and Spring Cloud Products

“VMware is pleased to join the Docker Verified Publisher’s program. This provides developers unrestricted access to our artifacts and allows them to safely adopt the popular open-source technologies we’ve made available. We are excited that VMware Tanzu customers, in particular, will benefit from a wider range of complementary services they can leverage as they quickly get apps to market.” - Ashok Aletty, VP Engineering, VMware

In May 2021, Docker, IncTM announced the launch of its Docker Verified Publisher Program which helps developers recognize trusted publisher software. For development teams, this is huge, since this program simplifies the consumption of secure and verified components for them, as they build their applications.  

What is the Docker Verified Publisher Program? 

When building container-based applications or deployment templates such as Helm charts, it is a frequent practice to grab pre-built building blocks to quickly create application images. A common concern among developers is to make sure that the pieces being used to build their applications are secure, reliable, maintained and up to date. Nobody wants to spend time fixing security issues or exposing their software supply chain to malicious content.  

To make it easier to select robust, trusted, and reliable software when navigating through Docker Hub, Docker has launched the Docker Verified Publisher Program. With more than 200 ISVs and thousands of individual contributors delivering software through Docker Hub, the creation of a “Verified Publisher” badge enables development teams to quickly recognize trustworthy containerized images. Docker’s differentiated and trusted content can be used as reliable building blocks for quickly building, sharing, and running applications with complete confidence.  

In addition, developers will benefit from being exempt from rates limiting. This means that regardless of the Docker Hub subscription they opted for, they will have unlimited container image requests for Bitnami, Tanzu, and Spring cloud repositories.  

How can I find VMware Images Labelled “Verified Publisher”? 

VMware with its Bitnami, Tanzu, and Spring Cloud products has joined the Docker Verified Publisher program to enable developers to find trusted content for use in their application delivery pipeline.  

This will allow developers to have unlimited access to VMware’s robust and secure components.

From now on, all users, especially VMware Tanzu customers, will be able to accelerate time to market for their applications by accessing an extended offering of complementary services.  

As a part of VMware’s open-source offerings, Bitnami delivers more than 250 images labelled as “Verified Publisher” in Docker Hub. To discover them, navigate to Docker Hub and enable the “Verified Publisher” filter. You will see the “Verified Publisher” badge in the upper right corner of each image.  

Support and Resources 

Both the Tanzu Developer Center and the Bitnami Documentation Tutorials site are full of handy resources that will enable you to benefit from using VMware’s Docker Verified Publisher images when building your applications.  

Also, check out the VMware and Bitnami GitHub official repositories to contribute to these projects and to solve the problems you may have by opening an issue. Our support teams will be happy to help you there! 

How-To: Deploy Bitnami’s LAMP Appliance to VMware Environments Directly via VMware Marketplace!

If you are a developer, there is a high chance that you’ve utilized the LAMP stack in the past 24 hours. The LAMP stack, consisting of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python, is a web service tool used to quickly build websites and applications through a reliable coding framework. 

For developers who work with VMware environments, the easiest way to deploy the LAMP stack is through the Bitnami-packaged appliance that’s available on the VMware Marketplace – VMware’s one-stop-shop to discover, try and deploy open-source and third-party ecosystem solutions for all VMware products.  

Why use the Bitnami LAMP Appliance? 

LAMP is an extremely popular package of fully open-source services. So - what’s so special about the Bitnami-packaged version? And why use it via the VMware Marketplace, instead of just downloading and configuring it on your own? 

The Bitnami LAMP Appliance provides developers with standalone project directories where they can store their applications. Thus, they can start deploying their PHP applications without the need to set up the entire infrastructure.  This image bundles together the most up-to-date releases of PHP, Apache, and MySQL Linux, as well as phpMyAdmin, PHP modules, and Composer. Apache is configured with the 'event' Multi-Processing Module and PHP-FPM, which is an ideal configuration for high-traffic websites that serve a lot of simultaneous requests.  

Most importantly, the Bitnami LAMP solution is ready for production environments. That means that it includes SSL auto-configuration with Let’s Encrypt certificates and HTTPS/HTTP2 support, all of which allow developers to build more secure sites and applications as quickly as possible.  

The complete Bitnami catalog – including the LAMP appliance – is accessible from the VMware Marketplace, allowing users to easily deploy a wide range of highly secure, industry standardized, and open-source applications across all VMware environments. 

By deploying the Bitnami LAMP Appliance from the VMware Marketplace, developers only need to focus on building applications, without having to worry about governance, security, and so on.  It can be deployed to environments such as VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud Director, and VMware vSphere. Developers can save time, effort, and resources. 

So how does it really work? 

To consume LAMP directly from VMware Marketplace, you would just need to browse the catalog, find the LAMP solution, and hit ‘Subscribe’. From there, just input the deployment configuration parameters. Within seconds, your application will be running in the infrastructure of your choice -whether it is in a public, private or hybrid environment. 

To see the process step-by-step, watch the demo video below, where Bitnami engineer Michiel D’Hont subscribes to the LAMP appliance via the VMware Marketplace! 

Next steps 

Interested in using the VMware Marketplace? Sign up today on our catalog page – it’s free! For more information, refer to our Docs and learn more on our marketing page or blogs page.  

For more information on Bitnami, please refer to the Bitnami and Bitnami documentation websites. 

To get started with subscribing to the Bitnami LAMP, click here!  

 

Subscribe to Bitnami LAMP Now

AWS re:Invent 2019 Is Coming!

Join the Bitnami team at AWS re:Invent 2019, December 2-5, in Las Vegas and learn more about how Bitnami’s range of offerings can help you accelerate software development and delivery.

You can find us at VMware booth #2108 (pod 12) in the Venetian / Sands Expo Hall. Our experts will be able to show you how to leverage our open-source application catalog available on the AWS Marketplace, in a hybrid cloud model on VMC on AWS, and more.

Bitnami will also be sharing more about our recent announcement, Project Galleon - a new enterprise offering focused on delivering a superior developer self-service experience, while simultaneously helping IT enforce security and compliance standards. The focus of this offering is to help development teams go from ideation to production easier, faster, and with best practices built-in from the ground up.

We’ll also be highlighting Bitnami solutions for building modern apps during sessions at the VMware Code booth. Check out all our sessions and presentations below, and remember to add them to your re:Invent agenda today!

{CODE} Sessions 

VMware Booth #309, Aria / Pinyon Ballroom

Wednesday, 1:30 PM

Shortcut and Better Secure Modern App Development with Bitnami Containers and Chart Foundations

Thursday, 12.30 PM

Continuously Refresh and Secure Software Catalogs, Providing Simple and Secure Access

Presentations

VMware booth #2108 Theatre area, Venetian / Sands Expo Hall

Tuesday, 1.30 PM | Wednesday, 9.30 AM | Thursday, 11 AM

Managing Software Supply Chains with Bitnami and Project Galleon

We’re looking forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

VMware to acquire Bitnami

We are proud and excited to announce that VMware is acquiring Bitnami!

This is fantastic news for our users and partners. We will continue to deliver the Bitnami catalog of apps that you know and love, across all the platforms we currently support, including all the major cloud vendors. Joining forces with VMware means that we will be able to both double-down on the breadth and depth of our current offering and bring Bitnami to even more clouds as well as accelerating our push into the enterprise.

We built Bitnami from zero to a significant user base, with all of the major cloud vendors as customers. We primarily bootstrapped the business, having raised just  $1.1M from YCombinator and a handful of great angels, when we were already profitable. We have a great team, great products, and a great business. Why join forces with VMware? This was actually an easy decision and has to do with our shared vision for the future.

Our mission at Bitnami is to make awesome software available to everyone, everywhere. There is a lot of great software out there, much of it open source, that is out of reach of many developers and system administrators because it is too complex to set up and maintain.

Our focus is to make that software accessible to the largest number of users and developers possible. We started with native installers that ran on Windows, Linux, and macOS. After a few clicks, users could get a complete web application such as WordPress up and running in their laptop without having to manually install and configure Apache, MySQL, PHP, and supporting libraries. Over time, we expanded to VMs, cloud images, and containers while maintaining our focus on keeping applications easy to use, secure, and up to date.

Over the past years, we expanded our focus to help enterprises use Bitnami in production, often as part of a migration of their application to the cloud or their adoption of Kubernetes. We realized that, if we wanted to continue to grow, we would have to raise money, as building an enterprise salesforce is not easy to do when you are bootstrapped. This was a decision we didn’t take lightly, but not raising money had its own risks, including potentially missing a window of opportunity in the industry.

As part of the fundraising process, we were approached by several vendors in the space to make strategic investments or, in some cases, join forces. While this was not our original goal, as part of the conversations that we had during this process, we realized that VMware would be the ideal partner for us. We both believe in a Kubernetes and multi-cloud future. We both share large enterprise customers, including cloud service providers. We both are building products and services to help companies navigate this multi-platform, multi-vendor world with a focus on enterprises. VMware already has more than 500,000 customers globally!

What really sealed the deal for us was getting to know the team at VMware: smart, talented and driven. This positive personal chemistry was tremendously important to us as founders. When you have been building a company over a decade, you want to make sure it is the right home for the team and product.

So what does it mean for you, our users and partners? In a way, nothing is changing. We will continue to develop and maintain our application catalog across all the platforms we support and even expand to additional ones. Additionally, if you are a company using Bitnami in production, a lot of new opportunities just opened up. Get in touch!

Startups are a team sport. Bitnami has become what it is today thanks to the hard work of an incredible team that we have assembled over the years and that has stuck with us through all the ups and downs of the startup rollercoaster. For some of them, this was their first job out of college, and they have grown professionally over the years to become great managers and engineers, alongside the company itself. We cannot think of a better way to continue their contributions and career growth than as part of VMware, an industry leader.

We also want to take this opportunity to thank those who believed in us from the beginning. We were fortunate to have an incredible group of investors and advisors who have supported us along the way, and would like to especially thank the following people for their unwavering support: Jesus Blanco, Armando Pauker, Peter Courture, Joe Brescia, Clemens Buss, Beau Vrolyk, Elad Gil, Othman Laraki, Diego Basch, Jun Li, Eric Hahn, Ullas Naik, Hiro Maeda, Mike Olson, Michael Hughes, Marten Mickos, Michael Levit, Ali Rowghani, and the entire Y Combinator team.

Erica, Daniel, and the Bitnami team

Find us at VMWorld 2015 - SF, CA

We’re speaking at VMWorld 2015! Join us for the vCloud Air Hackathon (VMworld’s first hackathon) and lunchtime talk. The hackathon is open to all VMworld attendees.

Bitnami will be co-presenting a session on “Dev Ops Awesomeness with Bitnami” with Nitin Saxena, Director of Solutions Marketing from the VMware vCloud Air team. We’ll be demonstrating how easy it is to get started using vCloud Air using the Bitnami Launchpad, as well as how to build scalable container-based applications using the Bitnami Container images for Docker, Kubernetes and vCloud Air.

Our talk will be on Wednesday 2nd September at 12:30pm in the Dev Ops @ VMware area. Can’t make it? We’re at Moscone all week and would love to connect and give you a limited edition Bitnami t-shirt!

Need a pass for VMworld 2015? Use registration code VMWDEVDAY for a complimentary one day pass for Wednesday 2nd September. 

Registration is here. See you there!

Announcing the Bitnami Launchpad for VMware vCloud Air OnDemand

Bitnami is dedicated to making it super simple to run awesome applications and development stacks in the cloud. That's why today we're pleased to announce support for the VMware hybrid cloud "VMware vCloud Air" alongside the leading public cloud providers we already support.

The Bitnami Launchpad for vCloud Air gives you instant access to more than 100 popular applications, pre-configured and optimized for vCloud Air suitable for small, medium or large companies. The launchpad includes line-of-business applications and developer stacks that, combined with the vCloud Air platform, can take your next project from zero to production in record-time.

If you are looking for a production-ready cloud that is fully compatible with your onsite data center, you’ll want to check out this new offering.

Get started in 5 minutes or less

1. Sign up for VMware's Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand service 
2. Create a free Bitnami account or sign in to select an application or development stack
3. Launch images directly from the Bitnami vCloud Air OnDemand Launchpad 

The Bitnami Launchpad for VMware vCloud Air is free to use. VMware will only charge you directly for the cloud resources you consume. New to VMware? New users can claim a $300 service credit with vCloud Air to use during the first 90 days.

Watch this short video for a step-by-step tutorial on how to get up and running.



Ready to run your favorite app on VMware vCloud Air OnDemand now? Get started! Sign up for VMware vCloud Air OnDemand. Already tried it? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Vote for Bitnami's session at VMworld 2015

Attending VMworld this fall? The VMworld 2015 Conference for Virtualization and Cloud Computing is open to public voting now through May 26th. You can now vote for Bitnami session #4867, Zero to App Awesomeness in 10 Minutes with vCloud Air.  

In this session we will demo how to deploy and configure complex, real-world applications to VMware vCloud Air. 

Led by VMware Cloud Architect, Massimo Re Ferrè and Bitnami VP of Product, Simon Bennett, you will learn how to combine Bitnami’s application stacks with vCloud Air’s per-minute pricing, and leave the session ready to roll-out new solutions in minutes. 

Key concepts such as networking and firewall setup, working across regions, and migrating between the cloud and the datacenter will be covered. In addition to addressing infrastructure considerations, we’ll also demonstrate popular applications available for vCloud Air and show you how they can help business users and software developers within your organization.

63% of businesses say that cloud computing improves agility. Learn how to move fast and not break things. Vote early, vote often, vote here! 

Deploy Your Favorite BitNami Apps to VMware vFabric Application Director

We have partnered with VMware to bring your favorite BitNami apps to VMware vFabric Application Director! You can now find free application blueprints for SugarCRM, JasperReports Server, Drupal, Joomla!, Liferay and other applications in the new VMware Cloud Applications Management Marketplace, which was launched today.

vFabric Application Director is designed to simplify the multi-tier deployment of applications by providing a drag and drop interface that lets you visually build application deployments. In collaboration with VMware, we  have prepared both application components and deployment blueprints for many of the top BitNami applications. This means that you can point and click your way to deploying SugarCRM, Alfresco, Liferay and other apps in multi-tier configurations on VMware vCloud-powered private, public and hybrid clouds in a few mouse clicks. We are particularly excited about this announcement because it is the first time we are providing a way to deploy BitNami applications in a multi-tiered architecture. 

Currently available applications are listed below. Click on an icon for a how to for deploying the app on vFabric. 

Enjoy!

Installing VMWare tools on BitNami Virtual Appliances

Tutorial explaining how to install vmware-tools in the BitNami Virtual Appliances.

Video Tutorial: Launching BitNami Virtual Appliances

How-To Video: Getting up and running a BitNami virtual machine image, or ‘virtual appliance’.