In 2006, about 2 percent of all computer processing workloads were done in the public cloud and 98 percent were done using on-premises data centers, according to VMware’s internal research shared with 2016 VMworld attendees during the keynote speech. And, private cloud as a term hadn’t even been invented yet.
A decade later, 15 percent of workloads are in the public cloud, 12 percent on the private cloud, and 75 percent are on traditional on-premises IT, according to VMware’s research.
VMware estimates that the tipping point between cloud (public and private together) and on-premises IT will occur in 2021. The estimated tipping point between public cloud and the combination of private cloud and on-premises IT is in 2030.
As more and more workloads move to the cloud, fewer and fewer on-premises workloads will remain, meaning fewer IT staff will be required with those skill sets. Learning cloud and cross-cloud management will help you to stand out and help you to be employable in the future.
With this future in mind, VMware made several announcements during VMworld to keep themselves relevant in this rapidly changing cloud computing world. My colleague Rebecca Fitzhugh talked about some of them in her blog, “VMworld 2016: Top Announcements”. I’d like to dive a little bit deeper into what implications Cloud Foundation and Cross-Cloud Services will have on cloud workloads.
Cross-Cloud Architecture
The combination of VMware’s new Cloud Foundation and Cross-Cloud Services will build the Cross-Cloud Architecture. VMware’s vision is to enable any cloud, any application (legacy or cloud native, with or without containers) on any device.
As VMware has been saying for several years, we are moving into the era of the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). We are moving towards software defined everything, which is so much more flexible and leads to greater agility for the enterprise, plus it is often cheaper. VMware’s solution is based on vSphere, NSX and VSAN, which covers the virtualization of computing, networking and storage, respectively.
Cloud Foundation has the ability to bundle and deploy a combination of vSphere, NSX and VSAN. It will come as a bundle and has its own installer, so you don’t need to worry about installing each component, and it also has an updater that will update each of the components and keep them all at supported levels relative to each other. Cloud Foundation is available immediately for on-premises computing, networking and storage and will be available via various cloud partners as a service, the first of which is IBM / SoftLayer. Once you purchase and install the hardware, this platform can be deployed and operational in a few hours instead of months.
Next, as more and more workloads move to the cloud, there needs to be a simple way to move workloads between the on-premises infrastructure and various cloud providers. VMware Cross-Cloud Services will handle this. This product is designed to support consistent policies as virtual machines (VMs) move between various public clouds and on-premises infrastructures, such as security, firewall, compliance, and other policies. It will work across multiple clouds, including Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS.
More Container Support
As part of the support for containers, VMware announced some updates to vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC), including a container engine and registry to track what has been deployed and where.
They also discussed their other container project, Photon, which is now available on GitHub. Photon is an open source project that is a Linux container host for container systems like Docker and container scheduling frameworks like Kubernetes that is as small and optimized as possible for use with vSphere.
Finally in the cloud space, VMware also discussed vSphere Integrated OpenStack (VIO), which allows the OpenStack APIs to be made available to developers while being managed through vSphere. It is available to all Enterprise Plus customers.
As always, VMworld has many announcements, but it was very refreshing after years of “cloud” to see how VMware is extending the old cloud strategy to include the other major cloud vendors as well, instead of trying to lock people into a specific cloud and family of products.
Related Training
VMware Training