Alibaba Cloud Archives

From Cloud-First to Cloud-Smart to Repatriation

Aug 29, 2024 | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Edge Computing, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Explore 2024 happened this week in Las Vegas. I think many people were curious about what Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom, had to say during the general session. He delivered interesting statements and let everyone in the audience know that “the future of enterprise is private – private cloud, private AI, fueled by your own private data“. On social media, the following slide about “repatriation” made quite some noise:

VMware Explore 2024 Keynote Repatriation

The information on this slide came from Barcley’s CIO Survey in April 2024 and it says that 8 out of 10 CIOs today are planning to move workloads from the public cloud back to their on-premises data centers. It is interesting, and in some cases even funny, that other vendors in the hardware and virtualization business are chasing this ambulance now. Cloud migrations are dead, let us do reverse cloud migrations now. Hybrid cloud is dead, let us do hybrid multi-clouds now and provide workload mobility. My social media walls are full of such postings now. It seems Hock Tan presented the Holy Grail to the world.

Where is this change of mind from? Why did only 43% during COVID-19 plan a reverse cloud migration and now “suddenly” more than 80%?

I could tell you the story now about cloud-first not being cool anymore, that organizations started to follow a smarter cloud approach, and then concluded that cloud migrations are still not happening based on their expectations (e.g., costs and complexity). And that it is time now to bring workloads back on-premises. It is not that simple.

I looked at Barclay’s CIO survey and the chart (figure 20 in the survey) that served as a source for Hock Tan’s slide:

Barclays CIO Survey April 2024 Cloud Repatriation We must be very careful with our interpretation of the results. Just because someone is “planning” a reverse cloud migration, does it mean they are executing? And if they execute such an exercise, is this going to be correctly reflected in a future survey?

And which are the workloads and services that are brought back to an enterprise’s data center? Are we talking about complete applications? Or is it more about load balancers, security appliances, databases and storage, and specific virtual machines? And if we understand the workloads, what are the real reasons to bring them back? Figure 22 of the survey shows “Workloads that Respondents Intend to Move Back to Private Cloud / On-Premise from Public Cloud”:

Barclays CIO Survey April 2024 Workload to migrate

Okay, we have a little bit more context now. Just because some workloads are potentially migrated back to private clouds, what does it mean for public cloud vs. private cloud spend? Question #11 of the survey “What percentage of your workloads and what percentage of your total IT spend are going towards the public cloud, and how have those evolved over time?” focuses on this matter.

Barclays CIO Survey April 2024 Percentage of Workloads and Spend My interpretation? Just because one slide or illustration talks about repatriation does not mean, that the entire world is just doing reverse migrations now. Cloud migrations and reverse cloud migrations can happen at the same time. You could bring one application or some databases back on-premises but decide to move all your virtual desktops to the public cloud in parallel. We could still bring workloads back to our data center and increase public cloud spend.

Sounds like cloud-smart again, doesn’t it? Maybe I am an organization that realized that the applications A, B, C, and D shouldn’t run in Azure, AWS, Google, and Oracle anymore, but the applications W, X, Y, and Z are better suited for these hyperscalers.

What else?

I am writing about my views and my opinions here. There is more to share. During the pandemic, everything had to happen very quickly, and everyone suddenly had money to speed up migrations and application modernization projects. After that, I think it is a natural thing that everything was slowing down a bit after this difficult and exhausting phase.

Some of the IT teams are probably still documenting all their changes and new deployments on an internal wiki, and their bosses started to hire FinOps specialists to analyze their cloud spend. It is no shocking surprise to me that some of the financial goals haven’t been met and result in a reverse cloud migration a few years later.

But that is not all. Try to think about the past years. What else happened?

Yes, we almost forgot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Sovereign Clouds.

Before 2020, not many of us were thinking about sovereign clouds, data privacy, and AI.

Most enterprises are still hosting their data on-premises behind their own firewall. And some of this data is used to train or finetune models. We see (internal) chatbots popping up using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which delivers answers based on actual data and proprietary information.

Okay. What else?

Yep, there is more. There are new technologies and offerings available that were not here before. We just covered AI and ML (machine learning) workloads that became a potential cost or compliance concern.

The concept of sovereign clouds has gained traction due to increasing concerns about data sovereignty and compliance with local regulations.

The adoption of hybrid and hybrid multi-cloud strategies has been a significant trend from 2020 to 2024. Think about VMware’s Cloud Foundation approach with Azure, Google, Oracle etc., AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, Oracle’s DRCC, or Nutanix’s.

Enterprises started to upskill and train their people to deliver their own Kubernetes platforms.

Edge computing has emerged as a crucial technology, particularly for industries like manufacturing, telecommunications, and healthcare, where real-time data processing is critical.

Conclusion

Reverse cloud migrations are happening for many different reasons like cost management, performance optimization, data security and compliance, automation and operations, or because of lock-in concerns.

Yes, (cloud) repatriation became prominent, but I think this is just a reflection of the maturing cloud market – and not an ambulance.

And no, it is not a better moment to position your hybrid multi-cloud solutions, unless you understand the services and workloads that need to be migrated from one cloud to another. Just because some CIOs plan to bring back some workloads on-premises, does it mean/imply that they will do it? What about the sunk cost fallacy?

Perhaps IT leaders are going to be more careful in the future and are trying to find other ways for potential cost savings and strategic benefits to achieve their business outcomes – and keep their workloads in the cloud versus repatriating them.

Businesses are adopting a more nuanced workload-centric strategy.

What’s your opinion?

Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure Offerings Are The New Multi-Cloud

Aug 5, 2024 | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Edge Computing, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Supercloud, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation

Since VMware belongs to Broadcom, there was less focus and messaging on multi-cloud or supercloud architectures. Broadcom has drastically changed the available offerings and VMware Cloud Foundation is becoming the new vSphere. Additionally, we have seen big changes regarding the partnerships with hyperscalers (the Azures and AWSes of this world) and the VMware Cloud partners and providers. So, what happened to multi-cloud and how come that nobody (at Broadcom) talks about it anymore?

What is going on?

I do not know if it’s only me, but I do not see the term “multi-cloud” that often anymore. Do you? My LinkedIn feed is full of news about artificial intelligence (AI) and how Nvidia employees got rich. So, I have to admit that I lost track of hybrid clouds, multi-clouds, or hybrid multi-cloud architectures.

Cloud-Inspired and Cloud-Native Private Clouds

It seems to me that the initial idea of multi-cloud has changed in the meantime and that private clouds are becoming platforms with features. Let me explain.

Organizations have built monolithic private clouds in their data centers for a long time. In software engineering, the word “monolithic” describes an application that consists of multiple components, which form something larger. To build data centers, we followed the same approach by using different components like compute, storage, and networking. And over time, IT teams started to think about automation and security, and the integration of different solutions from different vendors.

The VMware messaging was always pointing in the right direction: They want to provide a cloud operating system for any hardware and any cloud (by using VMware Cloud Foundation). On top of that, build abstraction layers and leverage a unified control plane (aka consistent automation and operations).

And I told all my customers since 2020 that they need to think like a cloud service provider, get rid of silos, implement new processes, and define a new operating model. That is VMware by Broadcom’s messaging today and this is where they and other vendors are headed: a platform with features that provide cloud services.

In other words, and this is my opinion, VMware Cloud Foundation is today a platform with different components like vSphere, vSAN, NSX, Aria, and so on. Tomorrow, it is still called VMware Cloud Foundation, a platform that includes compute, storage, networking, automation, operations, and other features. No more other product names, just capabilities, and services like IaaS, CaaS, DRaaS or DBaaS. You just choose the specs of the underlying hardware and networking, deploy your private clouds, and then start to build and consume your services.

Replace the name “VMware Cloud Foundation” in the last paragraph with AWS Outposts or Azure Stack. Do you see it now? Distributed unmanaged and managed hybrid cloud offerings with a (service) consumption interface on top.

That is the shift from monolithic data centers to cloud-native private clouds.

From Intercloud to Multi-Cloud

It is not the first time that I write about interclouds, that not many of us know. In 2012, there was this idea that different clouds and vendors need to be interoperable and agree on certain standards and protocols. Think about interconnected private and public clouds, which allow you to provide VM mobility or application portability. Can you see the picture in front of you? What is the difference today in 2024?

In 2023, I truly believed that VMware figured it out when they announced VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal (VMC-E). To me, VMC-E was different and special because of Equinix, who is capable of interconnecting different clouds, and at the same time could provide a baremetal-as-a-service (BMaaS) offering.

Workload Mobility and Application Portability

Almost 2 years ago, I started to write a book about this topic, because I wanted to figure out if workload mobility and application portability are things, that enterprises are really looking for. I interviewed many CIOs, CTOs, chief architects and engineers around the globe, and it became VERY clear: it seems nobody was changing anything to make app portability a design requirement.

Almost all of the people I have spoken to, told me, that a lot of things must happen that could trigger a cloud-exit and therefore they see this as a nice-to-have capability that helps them to move virtual machines or applications faster from one cloud to another.

VMware Workload Mobility

And I have also been told that a lift & shift approach is not providing any value to almost all of them.

But when I talked to developers and operations teams, the answers changed. Most of them did not know that a vendor could provide mobility or portability. Anyway, what has changed now?

Interconnected Multi-Clouds and Distributed Hybrid Clouds

I mentioned it already before. Some vendors have realized that they need to deliver a unified and integrated programmable platform with a control plane. Ideally, this control plane can be used on-premises, as a SaaS solution, or both. And according to Gartner, these are the leaders in this area (Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure):

Gartner Magic-Quadrant-for-Distributed-Hybrid-Infrastructure

In my opinion, VMware and Nutanix are providing a hybrid multi-cloud approach.

AWS and Microsoft are providing hybrid cloud solutions. In Microsoft’s case, we see Azure Stack HCI, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS incl. Hybrid AKS) and Azure Arc extending Microsoft’s Azure services to on-premises data centers and edge locations.

The only vendor, that currently offers true multi-cloud capabilities, is Oracle. Oracle has Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer (DRCC) and Roving Edge, but also partnerships with Microsoft and Google that allow customers to host Oracle databases in Azure and Google Cloud data centers. Both partnerships come with a cross-cloud interconnection.

That is one of the big differences and changes for me at the moment. Multi-cloud has become less about mobility or portability, a single global control plane, or the same Kubernetes distribution in all the clouds, but more about bringing different services from different cloud providers closer together.

This is the image I created for the VMC-E blog. Replace the words “AWS” and “Equinix” with “Oracle” and suddenly you have something that was not there before, an interconnected multi-cloud.

What’s Next?

Based on the conversations with my customers, it does not feel that public cloud migrations are happening faster than in 2020 or 2022 and we still see between 70 and 80% of the workloads hosted on-premises. While we see customers who are interested in a cloud-first approach, we see many following a hybrid multi-cloud and/or multi-cloud approach. It is still about putting the right applications in the right cloud based on the right decisions. This has not changed.

But the narrative of such conversations has changed. We will see more conversations about data residency, privacy, security, gravity, proximity, and regulatory requirements. Then there are sovereign clouds.

Lastly, enterprises are going to deploy new platforms for AI-based workloads. But that could still take a while.

Final Thoughts

As enterprises continue to navigate the above mentioned complexities, the need for flexible, scalable, and secure infrastructure solutions will only grow. There are a few compelling solutions that bridge the gap between traditional on-premises systems and modern cloud environments.

And since most enterprises are still hosting their workloads on-premises, they have to decide if they want to stretch the private cloud to the public cloud, or the other way around. Both options can co-exist, but would make it too big and too complex. What’s your conclusion?

Momentum in the Cloud: Crafting Your Winning Strategy with VMware Cloud

Jul 27, 2023 | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, Data Protection, Edge Computing, Equinix, Google Cloud, HCX, Kubernetes, NSX, Observability, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Security, Supercloud, Tanzu Application Platform, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Explore, vSAN, vSphere

The time is right for VMware Cloud! In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern business, embracing the cloud has become essential for organizations seeking to stay competitive and agile. The allure of increased scalability, cost-efficiency, and flexibility has driven enterprises of all sizes to embark on cloud migration journeys. However, the road to a successful cloud adoption is often coming with challenges. Slow and failed migrations have given rise to what experts call the “cloud paradox,” where the very technology meant to accelerate progress ends up hindering it.

As businesses navigate through this paradox, finding the right strategy to harness the full potential of the cloud becomes paramount. One solution that has emerged as a beacon of hope in this complex landscape is VMware Cloud. With its multi-cloud approach, which is also known as supercloud, VMware Cloud provides organizations the ability to craft a winning strategy that capitalizes on momentum while minimizing the risks associated with cloud migrations.

The Experimental Phase is Over

Is it really though? The experimental phase was an exciting journey of discovery for organizations seeking the potential of multi-cloud environments. Companies have explored different cloud providers, tested a variety of cloud services, and experimented with workloads and applications in the cloud. It allowed them to understand the benefits and drawbacks of each cloud platform, assess performance, security and compliance aspects, and determine how well each cloud provider aligns with their unique business needs.

The Paradox of Cloud and Choice

With an abundance of cloud service providers, each offering distinct features and capabilities, decision-makers can find themselves overwhelmed with options. The quest to optimize workloads across multiple clouds can lead to unintended complexities, such as increased operational overhead, inconsistent management practices/tools, and potential vendor lock-in.

Furthermore, managing data and applications distributed across various cloud environments can create challenges related to security, compliance, and data sovereignty. The lack of standardized practices and tools in a multi-cloud setup can also hinder collaboration and agility, negating the very advantages that public cloud environments promise to deliver.

Multi-Cloud Complexity

(Public) Cloud computing is often preached for its cost-efficiency, enabling businesses to pay for resources on-demand and avoid capital expenditures on physical infrastructure. However, the cloud paradox reveals that organizations can inadvertently accumulate hidden costs, such as data egress fees, storage overage charges, and the cost of cloud management tools. Without careful planning and oversight, the cloud’s financial benefits might be offset by unexpected expenses.

Why Cloud Migrations are Slowing Down

Failed expectations. The first reasons my customers mention are cost and complexity.

While the cloud offers potential cost savings in the long run, the initial investment and perceived uncertainty in calculating the total cost of ownership can deter some organizations from moving forward with cloud migrations. Budget constraints and difficulties in accurately estimating and analyzing cloud expenses lead to a cautious approach to cloud adoption.

One significant factor impeding cloud migrations is the complexity of the process itself. Moving entire infrastructures, applications, and data to the cloud requires thorough planning, precise execution, and in-depth knowledge of cloud platforms and technologies. Many organizations lack the in-house expertise to handle such a massive undertaking, leading to delays and apprehensions about potential risks.

Other underestimated reasons are legacy systems and applications that have been in use for many years and are often deeply ingrained within an organization’s operations. Migrating these systems to the cloud may require extensive reconfiguration or complete redevelopment, making the migration process both time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Reverse Cloud Migrations

While I don’t advertise a case for repatriation, I would like to share the idea that companies should think about workload mobility, application portability, and repatriation upfront. You can infinitely optimize your cloud spend, but if cloud costs start to outpace your transformation plans or revenue growth, it is too late already.

Embracing a Smart Approach with VMware Cloud

To address the cloud paradox and maximize the potential of multi-cloud environments, VMware is embracing the cloud-smart approach. This approach is designed to empower organizations with a unified and consistent platform to manage and operate their applications across multiple clouds.

Single Cloud Operating Model: A single operating model that spans private and public clouds. This consistency simplifies cloud management, enabling seamless workload migration and minimizing the complexities associated with multiple cloud providers.
Flexible Cloud Choice: VMware allows organizations to choose the cloud provider that best suits their specific needs, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud infrastructure. This freedom of choice ensures that businesses can leverage the unique advantages of each cloud while maintaining operational consistency.
Streamlined Application Management: A cloud-smart approach centralizes application management, making it easier to deploy, secure, and monitor applications across multi-cloud environments. This streamlines processes, enhances collaboration, and improves operational efficiency.
Enhanced Security and Compliance: By adopting VMware’s security solutions, businesses can implement consistent security policies across all clouds, ensuring data protection and compliance adherence regardless of the cloud provider.

Why VMware Cloud?

This year I realized that a lot of VMware customers came back to me because their cloud-first strategy did not work as expected. Costs exploded, migrations were failing, and their project timeline changed many times. Also, partners like Microsoft and AWS want to collaborate more with VMware, because the public cloud giants cannot deliver as expected.

Customers and public cloud providers did not see any value in lifting and shifting workloads from on-premises data centers to the public. Now the exact same people, companies and partners (AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc.) are back to ask for VMware their support, and solutions that can speed up cloud migrations while reducing risks.

This is why I am always suggesting a “lift and learn” approach, which removes pressure and reduces costs.

Organizations view the public cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation. Gartner forecasted in April 2023 that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is going to experience the highest spending growth in 2023, followed by PaaS.

It is said that companies spend most of their money for compute, storage, and data services when using Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. Guess what, VMware Cloud is a perfect fit for IaaS-based workloads (instead of using AWS EC2, Google’s Compute Engine, and Azure Virtual machine instances)!

Who doesn’t like the idea of cost savings and faster cloud migrations?

Disaster Recovery and FinOps

When you migrate workloads to the cloud, you have to rethink your disaster recovery and ransomware recovery strategy. Have a look at VMware’s DRaaS (Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service) offering which includes ransomware recovery capabilities as well.

If you want to analyze and optimize your cloud spend, try out VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth.

Final Words

VMware’s approach is not right for everyone, but it is a future-proof cloud strategy that enables organizations to adapt their cloud strategies as business needs to evolve. The cloud-smart approach offers a compelling solution, providing businesses with a unified, consistent, and flexible platform to succeed in multi-cloud environments. By embracing this approach, organizations can overcome the complexities of multi-cloud, unlock new possibilities, and set themselves on a path to cloud success.

And you still get the same access to the native public cloud services.

Supercloud – A Hybrid Multi-Cloud

Jun 7, 2023 | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, Edge Computing, Equinix, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Supercloud, VCPP, VMware Aria, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation

I thought it is time to finally write a piece about superclouds. Call it supercloud, the new multi-cloud, a hybrid multi-cloud, cross-cloud, or a metacloud. New terms with the same meaning. I may be biased but I am convinced that VMware is in the pole position for this new architecture and approach.

Let me also tell you this: superclouds are nothing new. Some of you believe that the idea of a supercloud is something new, something modern. Some of you may also think that cross-cloud services, workload mobility, application portability, and data gravity are new complex topics of the “modern world” that need to be discussed or solved in 2023 and beyond. Guess what, most of these challenges and ideas exist for more than 10 years already!

Cloud-First is not cool anymore

There is clear evidence that a cloud-first approach is not cool or the ideal approach anymore. Do you remember about a dozen years ago when analysts believed that local data centers are going to disappear and the IT landscape would only consist of public clouds aka hyperscalers? Have a look at this timeline:

VMware and Public Clouds Timeline

We can clearly see when public clouds like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure appeared on the surface. A few years later, the world realized that the future is hybrid or multi-cloud. In 2019, AWS launched “Outposts”, Microsoft made Azure Arc and their on-premises Kubernetes offering available only a few years later.

Google, AWS, and Microsoft changed their messaging from “we are the best, we are the only cloud” to “okay, the future is multi-cloud, we also have something for you now”. Consistent infrastructure and consistent operations became almost everyone’s marketing slogan.

As you can also see above, VMware announced their hybrid cloud offering “VMware Cloud on AWS” in 2016, the initial availability came a year after, and since 2018 it is generally available.

From Internet to Interclouds

Before someone coined the term “supercloud”, people were talking about the need for an “intercloud”. In 2010, Vint Cerf, the so-called “Father of the Internet” shared his opinions and predictions on the future of cloud computing. He was talking about the potential need and importance of interconnecting different clouds.

Cerf already understood about 13 years ago, that there’s a need for an intercloud because users should be able to move data/workloads from one cloud to another (e.g., from AWS to Azure to GCP). He was guessing back then that the intercloud problem could be solved around 2015.

We’re at the same point now in 2010 as we were in ’73 with internet.

In short, Vint Cerf understood that the future is multi-cloud and that interoperability standards are key.

There is also a document that also delivers proof that NIST had a working group (IEEE P2302) trying to develop “the Standard for Intercloud Interoperability and Federation (SIIF)”. This was around 2011. How did the suggestion back then look like? I found this youtube video a few years ago with the following sketch:

Intercloud 2012

Workload Mobility and Application Portability

As we can see above, VM or workload mobility was already part of this high-level architecture from the IEEE working group. I also found a paper from NIST called “Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap” dated July 2013 with very interesting sections:

Cloud platforms should make it possible to securely and efficiently move data in, out, and among cloud providers and to make it possible to port applications from one cloud platform to another. Data may be transient or persistent, structured or unstructured and may be stored in a file system, cache, relational or non-relational database. Cloud interoperability means that data can be processed by different services on different cloud systems through common specifications. Cloud portability means that data can be moved from one cloud system to another and that applications can be ported and run on different cloud systems at an acceptable cost.

Note: VMware HCX is available since 2018 and is still the easiest and probably the most cost-efficient way to migrate workloads from one cloud to another.

It is all about the money

Imagine it is March 2014, and you read the following announcement: Cisco is going big – they want to spend $1 billion on the creation of an intercloud

Yes, that really happened. Details can be found in the New York Times Archive. The New York Times even mentioned at the end of their article that “it’s clear that cloud computing has become a very big money game”.

In Cisco’s announcement, money had also been mentioned:

Of course, we believe this is going to be good for business. We expect to expand the addressable cloud market for Cisco and our partners from $22Bn to $88Bn between 2013-2017.

In 2016, Cisco retired their intercloud offering, because AWS and Microsoft were, and still are, very dominant. AWS posted $12.2 billion in sales for 2016, Microsoft ended up almost at $3 billion in revenue with Azure.

Remember Cisco’s estimate about the “addressable cloud market”? In 2018, Gartner presented the number of $145B for the worldwide public cloud spend in 2017. For 2023, Gartner forecasted a cloud spend of almost $600 billion.

Data Gravity and Egress Costs

Another topic I want to highlight is “data gravity” coined by Dave McCrory in 2010:

Consider Data as if it were a Planet or other object with sufficient mass. As Data accumulates (builds mass) there is a greater likelihood that additional Services and Applications will be attracted to this data. This is the same effect Gravity has on objects around a planet. As the mass or density increases, so does the strength of gravitational pull. As things get closer to the mass, they accelerate toward the mass at an increasingly faster velocity. Relating this analogy to Data is what is pictured below.

Put data gravity together with egress costs, then one realizes that data gravity and egress costs limit mobility and/or portability discussions:

Source: https://medium.com/@alexandre_43174/the-surprising-truth-about-cloud-egress-costs-d1be3f70d001

By the way, what happened to “economies of scale”?

The Cloud Paradox

As you should understand by now topics like costs, lock-in, and failed expectations (technically and commercially) are being discussed for more than a decade already. That is why I highlighted NIST’s sentence above: Cloud portability means that data can be moved from one cloud system to another and that applications can be ported and run on different cloud systems at an acceptable cost.

Acceptable cost.

While the (public) cloud seems to be the right choice for some companies, we now see other scenarios popping up more often: reverse cloud migrations (also called repatriation sometimes)

I have customers who tell me, that the exact same VM with the exact same business logic costs between 5 to 7 times more when they moved it from their private to a public cloud.

Let’s park that and cover the “true costs of cloud” another time. 😀

Public Cloud Services Spend

Looking at Vantage’s report, we can see the following top 10 services on AWS, Azure and GCP ranked by the share of costs:

If they are right and the numbers are true for most enterprises, it means that customers spend most of their money on virtual machines (IaaS), databases, and storage.

What does Gartner say?

Let’s have a look at the most recent forecast called “Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Reach Nearly $600 Billion in 2023” from April 2023:

Gartner April 2023 Public Cloud Spend Forecast

All segments of the cloud market are expected see growth in 2023. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2023 at 30.9%, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 24.1%

Conclusion

If most companies spend around 30% of their budget on virtual machines and Gartner predicts that IaaS is still having a higher growth than SaaS or PaaS, a supercloud architecture for IaaS would make a lot of sense. You would have the same technology format, could use the same networking and security policies, and existing skills, and benefit from many other advantages as well.

Looking at the VMware Cloud approach, which allows you to run VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) stack on AWS, Azure, Google, and many other public clouds, customers could create a seamless hybrid multi-cloud architecture – using the same technology across clouds.

Other VMware products that fall under the supercloud category would be Tanzu Application Platform (TAP), the Aria Suite, and Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations (TKO) which belong to VMware’s Cross-Cloud Services portfolio.

Final Words

I think it is important that we understand, that we are still in the early days of multi-cloud (or when we use multiple clouds).

Customers get confused because it took them years to deploy or move new or existing apps to the public cloud. Now, analysts and vendors talk about cloud exit strategies, reverse cloud migrations, repatriations, exploding cloud costs, and so on.

Yes, a supercloud is about a hybrid multi-cloud architecture and a standardized design for building apps and platforms across cloud. But the most important capability, in my opinion, is the fact that it makes your IT landscape future-ready on different levels with different abstraction layers.

What Is Unique About Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?

Sep 9, 2022 | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, ESXi, Google Cloud, HCX, Horizon, Kubernetes, NSX, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Tanzu, VCPP, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, vRealize, vSAN, vSphere

Everyone talks about multi-cloud and in most cases they mean the so-called big 3 that consist of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. If we are looking at the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services, one can also spot Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, IBM and Tencent Cloud.

VMware has a strategic partnership with 6 of these hyperscalers and all of these 6 public clouds offer VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) stack on top of their global infrastructure:

AWS – VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS)
Microsoft – Azure VMware Solution (AVS)
Google – Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE)
Alibaba – Alibaba Cloud VMware Service (ACVS)
IBM – IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions
Oracle – Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS)

While I mostly have to talk about AWS, AVS and GCVE, I am finally getting the chance to attend a OCVS customer workshop led by Oracle. That is why I wanted to prepare myself accordingly and share my learnings with you.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud dominate the cloud market, but Oracle has unique capabilities and characteristics that no one else can deliver. Additionally, Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has shown an impressive pace of innovation in the past two years, which led to a 16% increase on Gartner’s solution scorecard for OCI (November 2021, from 62% to 78%), which put them into the fourth place behind Alibaba Cloud!

What is Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution or OCVS is a result of the strategic partnership announced by VMware and Oracle in September 2019. Like the other VMware Cloud solutions like VMC on AWS, AVS or GCVE, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution will enable customers to run VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure.

Meaning, running an on-premises VMware-based infrastructure combined with OCVS should make cloud migrations easier and faster, because it is the same foundation with vSphere, vSAN and NSX.

Key Differentiator #1 – Different SDDC Bundles

Customers can choose between a multi-host SDDC (minimum of 3 production hosts) and a single-host SDDC, that is made for test and dev environments. Oracle guarantees a monthly uptime percentage of at least 99.9% for the OCVS service.

OCVS offers three different ESXi software versions and supports the following versions of other components:

ESXi 7.0, 6.7 or 6.5
vCenter 7.0, 6.7 or 6.5
vSAN 7.0, 6.7 or 6.5
NSX-T 3.0
HCX Advanced 4.0, 3.5 (default option)
HCX Enterprise (billed upgrade)

Note: vSphere 6.5 and vSphere 6.7 reach the End of General Support from VMware on October 15, 2022.

Key Differentiator #2 – Customer-Managed & Baremetal Hosts

The VMware Cloud offerings from AWS, Azure or Google are all vendor-controlled and customers get limited access to the VMware hosts and infrastructure components. With Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, customers get baremetal servers and the same operational experience as on-premises. This means full control over VMware infrastructure and its components:

SSH access to ESXi
Edit vSAN cluster settings
Browse datastores; upload and delete files
Customer controls the upgrade policy (version, time, defer)
Oracle has NO ACCESS after the SDDC provisioning!

Note: According to Oracle it takes about 2 hours to deploy a new SDDC that consists of 3 production hosts.

Customers can choose between Intel- and AMD-based hosts:

Two-socket BM.DenseIO2.52 with two CPUs each running 26 cores (Intel)
Two-socket BM.DenselO.E4.128 with two CPUs each running 16 cores (AMD)
Two-socket BM.DenselO.E4.128 with two CPUs each running 32 cores (AMD)
Two-socket BM.DenselO.E4.128 with two CPUs each running 64 cores (AMD)

Details about the compute shapes can be found here.

Key Differentiator #3 – Availability Domains

To provide high throughput and low latency, an OCVS SDDC is deployed by default across a minimum of three fault domains within a single availability domain in a region. But, upon request it is also possible to deploy your SDDC across multiple availability domains (AD), which comes with a few limitations:

While OCVS can scale from 3 up to 64 hosts in a single SDDC, Oracle recommends a maximum of 16 ESXi hosts in a multi-AD architecture
This architecture can have impacts on vSAN storage synchronization, and rebuild and resync times

Most hyperscaler only let you use two availability zones and fault domains in the same region. With Oracle it is possible to distribute the minimum of 3 hosts to 3 different availability domains. An availability domain consists of one or more data centers within the same region.

Note: Traffic between ADs within a region is free of charge.

Key Differentiator #4 – Networking

Because OCVS is customer-managed and can be operated like your on-premises environment, you also get “full” control over the network. OCVS is installed within a customers’ tencancy, which gives customer the advantage to run their VMware SDDC workloads in the same subnet as OCI native services. This provides lower latency to the OCI native services, especially for customers that are using Exadata for example.

Another important advantage of this architecture is capability to create VLAN-backed port groups on your vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS).

Key Differentiator #5 – External Storage

Since March 2022 the OCI File Storage service (NFS) is certified as secondary storage for an OCVS cluster. This allows customers to scale the storage layer of the SDDC without adding new compute resources at the same time.

And just announced on 22 August 2022, with Oracle’s summer ’22 release, OCVS customers can now connect to a certified OCI Block Storage through iSCSI as a second external storage option.

Block Storage provides high IOPS to OCI, and data is stored redundantly across storage servers with built-in repair mechanisms with a 99.99% uptime SLA.

Key Differentiator #6 – Billing Options

OCVS is currently only sold and supported by Oracle. Like with other cloud providers and VMware Cloud offerings, customers have different pricing options depending upon their commitment levels:

On-demand (hourly)
1 month
1 year
3 years

The rule of thumb for any hyperscaler says, that a 1-year commitment get around 30% discount and the 3-year commitments are around 50% discount.

The unique characteristic here is the monthly commitment option, which is caluclated with a discount of 16-17% depending on the compute shape.

Note: OCVS is not part (yet) of the VMware Cloud Universal subscription (VMCU).

Key Differentiator #7 – Global Reach

Currently, OCI is available in 39 different cloud regions (21 countries) and Oracle announced five more by the end of 2022. On day one of each region, OCVS is available with a consistent and predictable pricing that doesn’t vary from region to region.

To compare: AWS has launched 27 different regions with 19 being able to host the VMware Cloud on AWS service. In Switzerland, AWS just opened their new data center without having the VMware Cloud on AWS service available, while OCVS is already available in Zurich.

Use Cases

While OCVS is a great solution for joint VMware and Oracle customers, it is not necessary for customers to using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure native solutions.

Data Center Expansion

As you just learned before, OCVS is a great fit if you want to maintain the same VMware software versions on-premises and in OCI. The classic use case here is the pure data center expansion scenario, which allows you to stretch your on-premises infrastructure to OCI, without the need to use their native services.

VMware Horizon on OCVS

As I mentioned at the beginning, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is based on VMware Cloud Foundation and so it is no surprise that Horizon on OCVS is fully supported.

The Horizon deployment on OCVS works a little bit different compared to the on-premises installation and there is no feature parity yet:

Horizon on OCVS does not support vGPUs yet.
Horizon on OCVS does not support IPv6 yet.
Horizon on OCVS does not support vTPM yet. In this situation it is recommended to use shielded OCVS instances.

Note: The support of NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) is still a roadmap item

VMware Tanzu for OCVS

Since April 2022 it is possible for joint VMware and Oracle customers to use Tanzu Standard and its components with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Tanzu Standard comes with VMware’s Kubernetes distribution Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Tanzu Mission Control, which is the right solution for multi-cloud, multi-cluster K8s management.

With TMC you can deploy and manage TKG clusters on vSphere on-premises or on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. You can even attach existing Kubernetes clusters from other vendors like RedHat OpenShift, Amazon EKS or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

OCVS Tanzu Standard

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution FAQ

VMware’s OCVS FAQ can be found here.

Oracle’s OCVS FAQ can be found here.

Additional Resources

Here is a list of additional resources:

Interclouds And The Future of Cloud Computing

May 20, 2022 | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, Edge Computing, Google Cloud, Networking, Observability, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation

I am finally taking the time to write this piece about interclouds, workload mobility and application portability. Some of my engagements during the past four weeks led me several times to discussions about interclouds and workload mobility.

Cloud to Cloud Interoperability and Federation

Who has thought back in 2012 that we will have so many (public) cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud etc. in 2022?

10 years ago, many people and companies were convinced that the future consists of public cloud infrastructure only and that local self-managed data centers are going to disappear.

This vision and perception of cloud computing has dramatically changed over the past few years. We see public cloud providers stretching their cloud services and infrastructure to large data centers or edge locations. It seems they realized, that the future is going to look differently than a lot of people anticipated back then.

I was not aware that the word “intercloud” and the need for it exists for a long time already apparently. Let’s take David Bernstein’s presentation as an example, which I found by googling “intercloud”:

This presentation is about avoiding the mistake of using proprietary protocols and cloud infrastructures that lead to silos and a non-interoperable architecture. He was part of the IEEE Intercloud Working Group (P2302) which was working on a standard for “Intercloud Interoperability and Federation (SIIF)” (draft), which mentioned the following:

Currently there are no implicit and transparent interoperability standards in place in order for disparate
cloud computing environments to be able to seamlessly federate and interoperate amongst themselves.
Proposed P2302 standards are a layered set of such protocols, called “Intercloud Protocols”, to solve the interoperability related challenges. The P2302 standards propose the overall design of decentralized, scalable, self-organizing federated “Intercloud” topology.

David Bernstein Intercloud

I do not know David Bernstein and the IEEE working group personally, but it would be great to hear from some of them, what they think about the current cloud computing architectures and how they envision the future of cloud computing for the next 5 or 10 years.

As you can see, the wish for an intercloud protocol or an intercloud exists since a while. Let us quickly have a look how others define intercloud:

Cisco in 2008 (it seems that David Bernstein worked at Cisco that time). Intercloud is a network of clouds that are linked with each other. This includes private, public, and hybrid clouds that come together to provide a seamless exchange of data.

teradata. Intercloud is a cloud deployment model that links multiple public cloud services together as one holistic and actively orchestrated architecture. Its activities are coordinated across these clouds to move workloads automatically and intelligently (e.g., for data analytics), based on criteria like their cost and performance characteristics.

The Future of Cloud Computing

I found this post on Twitter on May 19th, 2022:

Alvin Cheung Berkeley Intercloud

Alvin Cheung is an associate professor at Berkeley EECS and wrote the following in his Twitter comments:

we argue that cloud computing will evolve to a new form of inter-cloud operation: instead of storing data and running code on a single cloud provider, apps will run on an inter-operating set of cloud providers to leverage their specialized services / hw / geo etc, much like ISPs.

Alvin and his colleagues wrote a publication which states “A Berkeley View on the Future of Cloud Computing” that mentions the following very early in the PDF:

We predict that this market, with the appropriate intermediation, could evolve into one with a far greater emphasis on compatibility, allowing customers to easily shift workloads between clouds.

[…] Instead, we argue that to achieve this goal of flexible workload placement, cloud computing will require intermediation, provided by systems we call intercloud brokers, so that individual customers do not have to make choices about which clouds to use for which workloads, but can instead rely on brokers to optimize their desired criteria (e.g., price, performance, and/or execution location).

We believe that the competitive forces unleashed by the existence of effective intercloud brokers will create a thriving market of cloud services with many of those services being offered by more than one cloud, and this will be sufficient to significantly increase workload portability.

Intercloud Broker

Organizations place their workloads in that cloud which makes the most sense for them. Depending on different regulations, data classification, different cloud services, locations, or pricing, they then decide which data or workload goes to which cloud.

The people from Berkeley do not necessarily promote a multi-cloud architecture, but have the idea of an intercloud broker that places your workload on the right cloud based on different factors. They see the intercloud as an abstraction layer with brokering services:

In my understanding their idea goes towards the direction of an intelligent and automated cloud management platform that takes the decision where a specific workload and its data should be hosted. And that it, for example, migrates the workload to another cloud which is cheaper than the current one.

Cloud Native Technologies for Multi-Cloud

Companies are modernizing/rebuilding their legacy applications or create new modern applications using cloud native technologies. Modern applications are collections of microservices, which are light, fault tolerant and small. These microservices can run in containers deployed on a private or public cloud.

Which means, that a modern application is something that can adapt to any environment and perform equally well.

The challenge today is that we have modern architectures, new technologies/services and multiple clouds running with different technology stacks. And we have Kubernetes as framework, which is available in different formats (DIY or offerings like Tanzu TKG, AKS, EKS, GKE etc.)

Then there is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the open source community which embrace the principal of “open” software that is created and maintained by a community.

It is about building applications and services that can run on any infrastructure, which also means avoiding vendor or cloud lock-in.

Challenges of Interoperability and Multiple Clouds

If you discuss multi-cloud and infrastructure independent applications, you mostly end up with an endless list of questions like:

How can we achieve true workload mobility or application portability?
How do we deal with the different technology formats and the “language” (API) of each cloud?
How can we standardize and automate our deployments?
Is latency between clouds a problem?
What about my stateful data?
How can we provide consistent networking and security?
What about identity federation and RBAC?
Is the performance of each cloud really the same?
How should we encrypt traffic between services in multiple clouds?
What about monitoring and observability?

Workload Mobility and Application Portability without an Intercloud

VMware has a different view and approach how workload mobility and application portability can be achieved.

Their value add and goal is the same, but with a different strategy of abstracting clouds.

VMware is not building an intercloud but they provide customer a technology stack (compute, storage, networking), or a cloud operating system if you will, that can run on top of every major public cloud provider like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.

VMware Workload Mobility

This consistent infrastructure makes it especially for virtual machines and legacy applications extremely easy to be migrated to any location.

What about modern applications and Kubernetes? What about developers who do not care about (cloud) infrastructures?

Project Cascade

At VMworld 2021, VMware announced the technology preview of “Project Cascade” which will provide a unified Kubernetes interface for both on-demand infrastructure (IaaS) and containers (CaaS) across VMware Cloud – available through an open command line interface (CLI), APIs, or a GUI dashboard.

The idea is to provide customers a converged IaaS and CaaS consumption service across any cloud, exposed through different Kubernetes APIs.

VMware Project Cascade

I heard the statement “Kubernetes is complex and hard” many times at KubeCon Europe 2022 and Project Cascade is clearly providing another abstraction layer for VM and container orchestration that should make the lives of developers and operators less complex.

Project Ensemble

Another project in tech preview since VMworld last year is “Project Ensemble“. It is about multi-cloud management platform that provides an app-centric self-service portal with predictive support.

Project Ensemble will deliver a unified consumption surface that meets the unique needs of the cloud administrator and SRE alike. From an architectural perspective, this means creating a platform designed for programmatic consumption and a firm “API First” approach.

I can imagine that it will be a service that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to simplify troubleshooting and that is capable in the future to intelligently place or migrate your workloads to the appropriate or best cloud (for example based on cost) including all attached networking and security policies.

Conclusion

I believe that VMware is on the right path by giving customers the option to build a cloud-agnostic infrastructure with the necessary abstraction layers for IaaS and CaaS including the cloud management platform. By providing a common way or standard to run virtual machines and containers in any cloud, I am convinced, VMware is becoming the defacto standard for infrastructure for many enterprises.

VMware Vision and Strategy 2022

By providing a consistent cloud infrastructure and a consistent developer model and experience, VMware bridges the gap between the developers and operators, without the need for an intercloud or intercloud protocol. That is the future of cloud computing.

Other relevant resources: