Michael Coté and Marc Zottner co-wrote this article. Legacy software can slow—or even stop—business growth. As organizations hit a legacy wall, they face an unfortunate reality: When IT systems are too old and unchangeable, it’s impossible to transform the way their core business works. In fact, 76 percent of executives say that legacy software is holding them back, according to a Forrester report commissioned by VMware. What does that mean for today’s businesses?

If you’ve ever attempted to cultivate a backyard vegetable garden, flower garden for your balcony, hydroponic tower, or other system to grow plants, you’ll understand that it’s not a matter of tossing down some seeds in soil and letting nature take its course. Without proper monitoring and management, ecosystems may grow out of control, or simply wither and die off.

Corey Dinkens, Sneha Narang, and Lauren Britton contributed to this blog post. VMware Tanzu Mission Control is a centralized hub for simplified, multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management. It helps platform teams take control of their Kubernetes clusters with visibility across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments by allowing users to group clusters and perform operations on these groupings.

While cloud native architecture offers many benefits when it comes to application modernization, some challenges remain for customers. However, VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations on Dell VxRail can improve application resiliency and the performance needed to quickly and securely build, deploy, and manage your multi-cloud environment.

The way to solve Kubernetes complexity is with tools. Ironically, this also creates a lot of complexity because there are many options for each type of tool and, thus, an unfathomable number of combinations. Each stack of tools first requires unique integrations, and then there's ongoing work to keep all those tools integrated and working together. It's no wonder, then, that we've seen a strong willingness for organizations to spend money on Kubernetes tools.

If you’re interested in Kubernetes, chances are extremely high the reason is because you want to support developers, by using Kubernetes to run the applications they write for your organization. There are other use cases, such as data analysis and running enterprise applications, but most Kubernetes workloads are there to help run an organization’s custom-written applications. So how is Kubernetes helping to reach that goal?