It’s that time of the year again, when all of VMware’s customers and the vCommunity at large assemble for the annual gathering of learning and shared knowledge that we call VMworld. 

This year, like last year, VMworld will be held in a virtual format and, just like last year, it’s completely free! Last year’s VMworld was a big success, with many great sessions and a record number of attendees who joined from around the world. 

As for Tanzu Service Mesh, I have good news for all you service mesh enthusiasts — and for those who are just starting to learn about service mesh. This year will see an exponential increase in the number of sessions that cover Tanzu Service Mesh. —

Service Mesh Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss: 

1. Solutions Keynote: DevSecOps Your Way to Any Cloud (And Delight Customers) [V13190]
   This session, led by Ajay Patel, SVP and GM of the Modern Apps and Management Business Unit, will review VMware solutions that enable a DevSecOps practice for our customers — and that includes Tanzu Service Mesh. Pratik Roychowdhury a Tanzu Service Mesh director of product management, will talk about how Tanzu Service Mesh provides a way to observe and control API calls exchanged between micro-services. Pratik will also describe our PII Data Leakage protection technology, which allows organizations to control the flow of personally identifiable information that micro-services pass on the mesh. This session will also cover much more, including a customer story. But I am not going to spoil the session for you, go ahead and register! 
2. NET2689: Automation is Modernizing Networks and NET2731: Automation is Modernizing Networks – See it in Action at HSBC
   Tom Gillis, SVP and GM NSBU, will deliver two keynotes which will include discussion of Tanzu Service Mesh. A key aspect of securely delivering modern apps in one or more clouds and across different workload types is to be able to provide policies as code seamlessly. Tom will explain what that literally means, and hear from a customer as well.
3. APP1994: Future of Modern Apps
   This session is led by two of the most visionary people at VMware: Pere Monclus, VP and NSBU CTO, and James Waters, the Modern Applications and management business unit CTO.  Alongside Bryn Worgan, Distinguished Engineer and Executive Director, JPMorgan Chase, the two will talk about how application modernization is done in the real world, across different infrastructures and clouds. Hearing from JPMC on the topic is no small thing, as the bank is one of the most advanced when it comes to delivering a digital experience for their customers, and they’ve got fleets of developers working on different cutting-edge tech projects. You wouldn’t want to miss this session, trust me.
4. NET2612: Modern Kubernetes Apps – Connecting, Securing, and Scaling Across Clouds (Part 1) – This first part of a two-part session, delivered by Pere Monclus, VP and CTO NSBU, with James Kaufman Executive Director at JPMC who will cover the ways modern Kubernetes apps are built for production use from a security and connectivity point of view. This session will address the network team and look at how they can support the business requirements of their apps in production.
5. NET2609: Modern Kubernetes Apps – Demos of Key Use Cases (Part 2)
   This is the second part of NET2612, in which Manish Chugtu, Technologist on the Tanzu Service Mesh team, and Roberto Mari, Sr. Director and Lead Technologist, will demo key concepts covered in Part 1 by Pere Monclus. They’ll provide a hands-on session, with plenty of demos for all you demo lovers.
6. APP2855S: Cloud Native: Maximize Microservices Architecture with Intel Optimizations
   This session is led by Manish Chugtu, our own technologist on the Tanzu Service Mesh team along with Intel principal engineers, Joe Carvalho and Saidulu Aldas. They’ll review how VMware and Intel are collaborating and working on next-generation technologies to better secure and optimize microservices and middleware with software and hardware. This will ensure developers have secure, best-in-class performance and a low-latency experience for their distributed apps running on Tanzu Service Mesh.
7. APP1781: Service-mesh-driven DevSecOps for Web3 Distributed Ledger Technologies
   Sergio Pozo from the Tanzu Service Mesh product team, alongside Ramki Krishnan, a lead technologist at VMware, will explain how distributed ledger technology (DLT) and decentralized apps (DApps) are key parts of the evolving Web3 landscape. In this session, you’ll learn about an enterprise-grade approach to addressing the operational security challenges (app/DApp integrity, communication confidentiality, vulnerability assessment, and rapid remediation) of VMware distributed ledger deployments through sticky integration with VMware Tanzu Service Mesh.
8. APP2285: Bridging the Lab-to-Production Gap for Kubernetes with Modern Apps Connectivity
   Susan Wu, Senior Product Marketing Manager and the co-author (with yours truly) of the “Service Mesh for Dummies” book, alongside Lei Yang, Director of Product Marketing, will discuss combining Tanzu Service Mesh and NSX-ALB (aka Avi Networks load balancing) into a modern solution that delivers connectivity and control for both east-west and north-south application traffic flows. This should be an interesting session, as it focuses specifically on bridging the lab-to-production gap for Kubernetes clusters and the apps that they manage.
9. APP2419: Recipe for App Modernization: Mix Equal Parts API Gateway and Service Mesh
   Pratik Roychowdhury, Director of Product Management, Tanzu Service Mesh, along with Chris Sterling, Director of Product Management – API Management at VMware, will discuss a subject that many are looking at in the service mesh space, which is making the API GW and the service mesh parts of the same solution. While not the same, these two technologies have a lot in common and even share overlapping responsibilities in certain areas. In this session, the duo will discuss where each solution fits and how the combination of technologies reflects what customers are looking for to secure and manage the API layer.
10. NET2698: Never Trust: Building Zero Trust Networks
    Pere Monclus, VP and CTO NSBU, and Craig Conors, VP and CTO of the Security BU, will deliver a session with Mark Frontier, CIO of the US Senate federal credit union, about how to deliver a real “zero trust” network architecture from the perspective of organizations that are heavily regulated and security averse. The session will provide a practical look at what it takes to adopt Zero Trust at scale.
11.  NET1730: Better Secure Your Modern Applications with No Compromise on Speed and Agility
    Pratik Roychowdhury, Director of Product Management, Tanzu Service Mesh, and Yves Fauser, Sr. Product Line Manager, NSX — and one of the best speakers I know — will deliver this highly technical session about how to protect modern applications in a secure yet non-disruptive manner, so that businesses can deliver innovation at the speed of code.
12. SEC2597: Innovations in Better Securing Modern Apps
    Amit Jain, Director of R&D in the Tanzu Service Mesh engineering team, and Rick McElroy, Principal Cyber Security Strategist in the NSBU, will deliver a session that focuses on VMware’s approach to a holistic security architecture that protects modern applications and how this bridges to existing virtualized applications. By looking at innovations in the areas of container security, vulnerability management, service mesh, and API security, they’ll help you enforce consistent Zero Trust principles across your virtualized and modern applications.
13. SEC1967: Secure the Software Supply Chain with Container Network Security
    In this session, Haim Helman, CTO for Carbon Black App Security, along with Manish Chugtu, Technologist on the Tanzu Service Mesh team, will cover aspects of securing modern apps: protecting the modern application supply chain, maintaining container image hygiene, and how to secure communications with Tanzu Service Mesh.
14. VI1448: Take a Modern Approach to Achieve Application Resiliency
    This session, delivered by Emad Benjamin, Senior Director, Chief Technologist, and author of many books about java application optimization on VMs, along with staff engineers Abhirama Mallela and Abhijit Patharkar, will discuss how to automate resiliency patterns — such as cloud bursting, disaster recovery, and auto scaling — across multiple products: VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, built on VMware NSX; VMware Tanzu Mission Control; VMware SASE; VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront; and VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer.
15. VI1086: The 3M’s of a Service-Level Objective: Manifest, Measure, Maintain
    Finally, this session, delivered by Emad Benjamin, Diwan Chandrabose, and Deepa Kalani, Staff Engineers at VMware, will cover how SREs can handle performance issues in a highly distributed application across different clouds using service-level objectives in Tanzu Service Mesh. You’ll also learn how to measure and maintain performance in these services based on established service-level objectives.  

Finally, I will also mention that we have a couple of demo only sessions (For demo lovers) showcasing the new features of TSM around Modern App Multi-Cloud Connectivity and API security called Securing Modern Apps with Tanzu Service Mesh [2944] and Multi-cloud Application Connectivity and Scalability – Key use Cases [2929] 

That’s it! Hope this is helpful to you all service mesh people. See you at VMworld!