Case Study: VMware achieves polyglot service discovery and secure container networking with Cloud Foundry

VMware enables polyglot service discovery with Cloud Foundry's apps.internal domain

VMware, a leading cloud-native platform provider, faced a challenge within its Cloud Foundry offering. While its container networking feature enabled direct, secure communication between application instances, developers were required to implement complex, external service discovery mechanisms. This created a significant hurdle, especially for developers using languages and frameworks beyond Java, limiting the feature's ease of use and adoption.

To solve this, VMware introduced a new polyglot service discovery feature integrated directly into the Cloud Foundry platform. This solution provided an "out of the box," DNS-based mechanism using a new `apps.internal` domain, allowing developers to use simple, familiar commands to make their applications discoverable on the internal container network. The result was a major step forward in developer ease-of-use, enabling secure microservices communication, blue-green deployments, and application clustering without requiring any external tools or complex DevOps implementation from customers.

VMware