App Launchpad is a VMware Cloud Director service extension which service providers can use to create and publish catalogs of deployment-ready applications. Tenant users can then deploy the applications with a single click.

As a service provider, you install App Launchpad in your data center.

App Launchpad supports the use of applications from the Bitnami applications catalog that is available in the VMware Marketplace.

You can also create catalogs of your custom, in-house applications and configure App Launchpad to work with these catalogs.

Starting with App Launchpad 2.0, you can also connect to Helm Chart repositories and import container applications. App Launchpad exposes the configuration parameters, so that tenant users can fine-tune the advanced settings of the container applications during deployment. You must configure a Kubernetes cluster as a deployment target for the container applications.

You can also use a mixture of all supported applications sources.

Architecture of App Launchpad

During the installation and configuration procedures, the App Launchpad user interface registers as a plug-in to VMware Cloud Director. As a result, you can access the App Launchpad user interface from the VMware Cloud Director service provider admin portal and the VMware Cloud Director tenant portal.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture of App Launchpad.


A diagram that displays the connections between App Launchpad and external components and VMware Cloud API and VMware Cloud Marketplace connections.

Components of App Launchpad

App Launchpad consists of three components.

Component Description
App Launchpad Service A Java service responsible for the App Launchpad back end and for the VMware Cloud Director extension service.
Command-Line Utility (alp) Contains the scripts required for configuring and managing App Launchpad.
App Launchpad Kubernetes Deployer (alp-deployer) A backend service responsible for the deployment of container applications to Kubernetes clusters.
App Launchpad User Interface Plug-in for VMware Cloud Director You use the alp command-line utility to install the user interface plug-in. The App Launchpad user interface plug-in registers as a plug-in to VMware Cloud Director and you can access the App Launchpad user interface directly from the VMware Cloud Director service provider admin portal and the VMware Cloud Director tenant portal.