Introduction
Over the last few months I have been working very closely with our Application Domain Architects here in Europe, thinking about how VMware’s Cloud Management technology has a vital part to play.
My colleague, Ed Hoppitt, has developed a great narrative called #RunAllTheThings which made me think – how does that relate to the Cloud Management technology I focus on?
So, we got together with a whiteboard and extended the story, bringing in Cloud Management to #ManageAllTheThings (as well as coming up with our slightly irreverent view of the 7 stages of a tech meeting!)
This first blog post will introduce you to #RunAllTheThings – in the next Blog post I will show how #ManageAllTheThings will turn your Run platform into a Cloud delivering Applications and Services.
#RunAllTheThings
There are many ways and directions organisations are taking to transform their applications and services. Some involve building brand new Cloud Native Applications, others simply involve taking older applications and updating them to meet modern requirements.
Silos
What we have often seen in clients going through this journey is an increasingly siloed approach to the different requirements. For example, for traditional applications, they may be looking at a basic IaaS with provisioning using vRealize Automation.
For CaaS (Containers as a Service) a different department may have taken a different approach – maybe running OpenShift to deploy Kubernetes, maybe running on RHEV, maybe even running on bare metal servers. (My tongue in cheek response to the latter is ‘Welcome to 2002 – that’s how we started with VMware GSX’.)
For PaaS (Platform as a Service), maybe yet another approach, perhaps running purely in Amazon’s native cloud.
When you take a step a back, and look at what the siloed outcome is, you quickly realise that we may have gone back to the dark ages of computing, stumbling into building some specialized towers of compute.
The reality is, we didn’t realise that ‘The Things’ we wanted to run all had the same fundamental requirement – it doesn’t matter if they are a Virtual Machine, a Docker Container, an application built on Kubernetes or Pivotal Cloud Foundry – at the end of the day, they all just need some compute, network and storage.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was just a single platform that spanned on-premises and Cloud, that could be small, medium, large, extra large, or hyperscale – a single platform that could #RunAllTheThings?
Consistent Infrastructure
Good news!
There is a single platform available from VMware and we talk about it as Consistent Infrastructure. A combination of software defined compute, storage and networking (vSphere, VSAN and NSX) available on premises (as vCloud Foundation or as a VMware Validated Design) or in the cloud (from VMware Cloud on AWS or one of our 4,500+ VCPP Partners). We can even stretch some of our networking technologies into the native cloud.
I often talk about this Consistent Infrastructure as a ‘solved problem’. I think the days of Platform Engineers plumbing servers, networking and storage together are largely over. There are pre-engineered solutions for this now and, from VMware at least, they pretty much answer all the infrastructure needs for all The Things you want to run.
In the next blog article in this series we will look at how we take this platform that will #RunAllTheThings and add the Cloud Management to #ManageAllTheThings.
CloudyTechnologist 