Planning for VMware Explore 2024 later this month in Las Vegas, and there is a great summary of Tanzu sessions on Pawel's blog here: https://virtualvillage.cloud/?p=1390 The panel session in particular should be a good time!
Here's a session list on the Explore site: https://myevents.vmware.com/widget/vmware/explore2024lv/1721319921776001Ib2X
While researching some of the vendor parties, all the previous community list locations were empty. Finally, vmblog posted an entry this week about the meager offerings: https://vmblog.com/archive/2024/07/31/vmware-explore-2024-where-have-all-the-parties-gone.aspx Where have all the parties gone, indeed!?
This is not totally unexpected: VMware was always conscious that while their enterprise footprint was rock-solid, it was the community engagement that helped IT professionals trust the VMware vision. With the Broadcom acquisition and some of their decisions to change licensing options, shake up some of the community platforms, and some tone-deaf responses from Broadcom, there have been loud proclamations (by some noisier elements of the community) that they are moving to other platforms. These have typically been small shops, which say their licensing renewal costs went up 3-10x due to the new bundles.
Other vendors have promptly tuned their marketing: AWS, RedHat and Nutanix all have pages dedicated to 'migrate from VMware', which is a contrast to the messaging during the VMware era. The VMware by Broadcom era has been a tectonic shift, particularly in the smaller business environments. It remains to be seen if this leads to more Cloud native hosting.