August 27, 2018
By Chris Wolf, CTO of Global Field and Industry at VMware
Since VMworld last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how artists innovate compared to how we innovate in IT. My wife is an artist and for her and other artists, there is no limit to the number or variety of colors that they can create or paint with. They break rules, create new mediums and inspirational works of art are born from paint, canvas, and pure imagination. Unlike those of us in IT, artists can create without restriction or consequence. IT is often more about pragmatic innovation or innovating within an accepted number of constraints. While we may never reach the outright freedom that artists enjoy, we should strive to remove as many barriers to creativity and innovation as possible.
Accelerating Innovation—Everywhere—at VMworld 2018
At VMworld 2018, we showcase a variety of new technologies and partnerships that will bring new levels of flexibility that further accelerate innovation for our customers. Anything that impedes a developer’s ability to manage applications and services using native tools and APIs will only serve to limit creativity. With this in mind, it is key to our vision that we provide consistent infrastructure for applications and data, and an operational model and tools that also remain globally consistent, regardless of where an application runs. Furthermore and most importantly, we introduced examples of how you can maintain a dependable operational and security model while preserving a native developer experience.
Innovations revealed at VMworld 2018 that support our vision include:
Ultimately, our goal is to give you the flexibility to run any application anywhere, as well as the ability to build new apps and services without having to pre-determine their future based on a set of artificial constraints. Change is a constant. That app built in the cloud today may need to run at the edge across thousands of sites next year. A merger or acquisition may necessitate technology being deployed in ways or places you never even considered. It’s the world we live in. We don’t know what we don’t know, until we know it.
Of course, saying you’d like to have the flexibility to run an application anywhere and quickly pivot as market dynamics change is easier said than done. When you consider application or data dependencies, networking, security, compliance, and performance and availability requirements, preserving flexibility is far from easy. Making it easy for you to accelerate innovation across clouds, data centers and edge sites is hard work but, if you’ve met a VMware engineer, you know that solving hard problems is what gets us out of bed. When you decouple your applications, data, networks and security from hardware dependencies, flexibility is no longer an aspiration, but a design element. This week at VMworld, we show you what innovating across a truly flexible fabric looks like and how you can increase the velocity at which you can deploy and manage applications and infrastructure anywhere expected (or unexpected) demands may take you. Here’s what’s in store.
VMware Cloud on AWS
Our Cloud Provider Program continues to see strong growth with more than 1,700 customers and IBM Cloud, one of more than 4,000 cloud provider partners. Today at VMworld, we announced several new capabilities with another key partner—Amazon Web Services (AWS). Those include:
Since the start of the joint partnership with AWS, we announced five major feature updates over the last twelve months, and we will continue to innovate at cloud-pace to meet our customers’ current and future needs.
VMware Cloud Services
There are plenty of apps, services and use cases where velocity is the primary driver. For many of those use cases, public cloud services are a great option. Our cloud services strategy is focused on streamlining operations, management, security and governance in those use cases. Today, we announced the availability of two new cloud services and new updates to Wavefront by VMware:
There are additional use cases where organizations want velocity, but also see control of intellectual property as a key requirement. That is one area where our digital foundation remains strategic to customers.
Digital Foundation
When you want to run an application or service anywhere and have the flexibility to move or redeploy an application to different data centers, sites or clouds, the VMware digital foundation gives you flexibility you require. I talk to a number of organizations that want to maintain control of the intellectual property for apps and services that define or differentiate their business or want to have the option to run an application built for one use case to apply to other use cases. For new open source initiatives, such as Kubernetes projects, VMware’s digital foundation makes it simple to deploy and scale applications and run them anywhere—all with consistent management and operations. To continue on that vision, including expanding support for highly demanding workloads such as for machine learning or inference, we announced the following product updates:
Digital Workspace
From the very beginning, our digital workspace vision focused on redefining how we consume and collaborate across apps and data. That boils down to delivering the right app at the right time in the right context, while providing a consumer-grade user experience. In continuing with our vision, we deliver on our end-user computing strategy at an aggressive pace. There are literally too many announcements for a single blog post, so here are some of my favorites:
Rethinking Hybrid Applications
Hybrid applications often carry the connection of being applications comprised of legacy and modern components, but why does it have to be that way? Beyond vibrant open source projects such as Kubernetes, there is also a new movement in which public cloud providers are bringing many of their key services to the edge. Since this is the case, we are reinventing what it means to build a hybrid application.
What if you could go best-of-breed and leverage application and data services or platforms from cloud providers and open source projects, running them side-by-side on a shared infrastructure platform? Since our inception, VMware enabled disparate applications to run together on shared server or desktop systems. You could easily consider cloud services to simply be a new generation of application platforms. In that case, virtualizing those services makes perfect sense. For many of our partners, infrastructure is important, but it’s ultimately a means to an end. If they can run their apps and services on a VMware stack and our customers can benefit from consistent infrastructure and operations, security, tooling and telemetry no matter where those apps or services run, then that’s a win for everyone.
Your Continuously Transforming Masterpiece
Artists can create amazing and timeless pieces, while in IT our masterpieces—innovations that we are truly proud of—must continually evolve and periodically completely reinvent themselves. Our work as IT practitioners is far from timeless, but the legacy we build for our businesses can be. That is why everything we pursue at VMware is about giving you the flexibility to create amazing solutions.
As market needs change, so can your solutions. The app born in the cloud might need to be at the edge in two years. It’s something that you may not have planned for, but we can help you get there, all without you having to change your operational or security model. Change is a constant in IT. One more constant is VMware’s commitment to do everything we can to allow you to build and evolve solutions that matter to your organization, allowing you to innovate with the expectation of change as a design principle.
Best of all—even at 20 years young—at VMware, we feel that we are just getting started. The best is yet to come.
Watch the VMworld 2018 US general session to hear more about the news.