VMWorld 2021 — The 3 Top Announcements
When Pat Gelsinger, now CEO at Intel, delivered his first VMworld keynote I was not optimistic that “Pat gets it”. But Pat did get it and so do Raghu and Sumit. Both of VMware’s new helmsmen (Kubernetes pun intended) seem laser-focused on capturing the company’s biggest asset, its 500.000 customers, for the company’s portfolio of VMware Cross-Cloud Services. In a nutshell, VMware Cross-Cloud Services aim to provide one unified platform for developers, operators, security engineers, networking engineers, and site reliability engineers.
“Raghu and Sumit are fully focused on turning current infrastructure virtualization customers into cloud native ones.” -CEO, VMware Partner
Raghu and Sumit are driving VMware’s portfolio up the stack with the ultimate goal of providing customers with a unified set of APIs for infrastructure, data services, platform services, and applications that can run in the data center, in the public cloud, in a service provider cloud, and at the edge.
The Vision of the Business Defined Data Center and Cloud
Ultimately, VMware Cross-Cloud Services aim to enable customers to make rational business driven decisions regarding workload placement, trouble shooting, and future investments, based on the “whole picture” of operations and DevOps data across the enterprise. For example, several product teams might decide to leverage a specific set of machine learning services from different public clouds, Cross-Cloud Services could observe and compare the project outcome in terms of cost, risk, performance, end user satisfaction and many further parameters to then automatically recommend the most successful machine learning services for a specific set of use cases.
“One set of APIs means one set of cloud engineers, one set of operations tools, and one set of developer services.”
The 3 Major Announcements of VMWorld 2021
Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)
Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) is VMware’s critical open source launch to get developers on board of the Tanzu application platform. With currently 75 contributors, 1,537 code commits, and 736 GitHub stars, TCE is off to a promising start. This momentum is underlined by an average of approximately 150 weekly issues and 190 comments submitted to GitHub.
TCE consists of a Kubernetes runtime, Kubernetes tooling and currently 23 add-on packages providing an integrated set of platform services for software developers to build and deploy application from an enterprise-grade environment on their local machine, on vSphere, AWS, Azure, and, I would imagine, ultimately Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Winning over developers is VMware’s number one goal in 2021 and beyond. The inability to achieve this goal in the early 2010s paved the way for the rapid rise of AWS, Azure, and GCP. In 2021 the company has taken another stab at it, with still 75% of enterprise applications up for grabs. I will closely observe TCE progress on GitHub and in the hands of actual developers, as a rapid increase in TCE adoption would be a clear signal indicating the success of VMware’s overall Cross-Cloud strategy.
2. VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts
VMware Cloud on AWS has been the topic that (based on EMA data) has drawn the most public interest at VMworld 2021. This topic is so important because if VMware can make developers (and operators) consume AWS cloud resources via its Tanzu portfolio, the company will have proven its point that public cloud simply is a commodity that enables scalability and flexibility for VMware-managed application stacks.
VMware Cloud is now available on AWS Outposts. Today’s initial use cases for this offering are a) controlling application and data locality, b) data center elasticity and resiliency, and c) app modernization. The anticipated future availability of Tanzu Services on VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts will be significant as it would make all applications, old and new, subject to management via VMware Cross-Cloud Services, turning AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud into providers of commodity infrastructure.
3. Project Capitola — Software Defined Memory
After virtualizing servers, storage, and networks, VMware has set sail toward memory virtualization. While this seems like an infrastructure play at first glance, Project Capitola (currently in tech preview) enables the policy-driven and hardware independent consumption of memory resources. This means, “code once, deploy anywhere” and it is a significant value proposition as software engineers frequently waste a lot of time on coding around memory performance bottlenecks, while at the same time high performance memory capacity is wasted on workloads that have no need for it. The significance of project Capitola goes beyond traditional software development, as software-defined memory could open up a large range of streaming data analytics and machine learning use cases for the edge, without developers having to worry about how to overcome traditional latency bottlenecks.
In a Nutshell: VMware’s Future Is Now
VMware’s relentless focus on moving up the stack to become the “one cloud that rules them all” deserves kudos. The company pursued this strategy since 2015, despite a good bit of resistance from customers and partners. Now, in 2021 everyone has to admit that it was in 2015 when Pat Gelsinger and his team made the hard decisions that have let to the company being ready to take on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, of course in a co-opetitive manner.
