The Backbone To Upgrade Your Multi-Cloud DevOps Experience

The Backbone To Upgrade Your Multi-Cloud DevOps Experience

Sep 8, 2022 | AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, CNCF, Edge Computing, Kubernetes, Observability, Tanzu, Tanzu Application Platform, VMware Explore, vSphere

Multi-Cloud is a mess. You cannot solve that multi-cloud complexity with a single vendor or one single supercloud (or intercloud), it’s just not possible. But different vendors can help you on your multi-cloud journey to make your and the platform team’s life easier. The whole world talks about DevOps or DevSecOps and then there’s the shift-left approach which puts more responsibility on developers. It seems to me that too many times we forget the “ops” part of DevOps. That is why I would like to highlight the need for Tanzu Mission Control (which is part of  Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations) and Tanzu Application Platform.

Challenges for Operations

What has started with a VMware-based cloud in your data centers, has evolved to a very heterogeneous architecture with two or more public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. IT analysts tell us that 75% of businesses are already using two or more public clouds. Businesses choose their public cloud providers based on workload or application characteristics and a public clouds known strengths. Companies want to modernize their current legacy applications in the public clouds, because in most cases a simple rehost or migration (lift & shift) doesn’t bring value or innovation they are aiming for.

A modern application is a collection of microservices, which are light, fault tolerant and small. Microservices can run in containers deployed in a private or public cloud. Many operations and platform teams see cloud-native as going to Kubernetes. But cloud-native is so much more than the provisioning and orchestration of containers with Kubernetes. It’s about collaboration, DevOps, internal processes and supply chains, observability/self-healing, continuous delivery/deployment and cloud infrastructures.

Expectation of Kubernetes

Kubernetes 1.0 was contributed as an open source seed technology by Google to the Linux Foundation in 2015, which formed the sub-foundation “Cloud Native Computing Foundation” (CNCF). Founding CNCF members include companies like Google, Red Hat, Intel, Cisco, IBM and VMware.

Currently, the CNCF has over 167k project contributors, around 800 members and more than 130 certified Kubernetes distributions and platforms. Open source projects and the adoption of cloud native technologies are constantly growing.

If we access the CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape, one will get an understanding how many open source projects are supported by the CNCF and maintained this open source community. Since donated to CNCF, almost every company on this planet is using Kubernetes, or a distribution of it:

These were just a few of total 63 certified Kubernetes distributions. What about the certified hosted Kubernetes service offerings? Let me list here some of the popular ones:

  • Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes
  • Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
  • Nutanix Karbon
  • Oracle Container Engine
  • OVH Managed Kubernetes Service
  • Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated

All these clouds and vendors expose Kubernetes implementations, but writing software that performs equally well across all clouds seems to be still a myth. At least we have a common denominator, a consistency across all clouds, right? That’s Kubernetes.

Consistent Operations and Experience

It is very interesting to see that the big three hyperscalers Amazon, AWS and Google are moving towards multi-cloud enabled services and products to provide a consistent experience from an operations standpoint, especially for Kubernetes clusters.

Microsoft got Azure Arc now, Google provides Anthos (GKE clusters) for any cloud and AWS also realized that the future consists of multiple clouds and plans to provide AKS “anywhere”.

They all have realized that customers need a centralized management and control plane. Customers are looking for simplified operations and consistent experience when managing multi-cloud K8s clusters.

Tanzu Mission Control (TMC)

Imagine that you have a centralized dashboard with management capabilities, which provide a unified policy engine and allows you to lifecycle all the different K8s clusters you have.

TMC offers built-in security policies and cluster inspection capabilities (CIS benchmarks) so you can apply additional controls on your Kubernetes deployments. Leveraging the open source project Velero, Tanzu Mission Control gives ops teams the capability to very easily backup and restore your clusters and namespaces. Just 4 weeks ago, VMware announced cross-cluster backup and restore capabilities for Tanzu Mission Control, that let Kubernetes-based applications “become” infrastructure and distribution agnostic.

Tanzu Mission Control lets you attach any CNCF-conformant K8s cluster. When attached to TMC, you can manage policies for all Kubernetes distributions such as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), Azure Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine or OpenShift.

Tanzu Mission Control Dashboard

In VMware’s ongoing commitment to support customers in their multi-cloud application modernization efforts, the Tanzu Mission Control team introduced the preview of lifecycle management of Amazon AKS clusters at VMware Explore US 2022:

Preview for lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters can enable direct provisioning and management of Amazon EKS clusters so that developers and operators have less friction and more choices for cluster types. Teams will be able to simplify multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management with centralized lifecycle management of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Amazon EKS cluster types.

Note: With this announcement I would expect that the support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is also coming soon.

Read the Tanzu Mission Control solution brief to get more information about its benefits and capabilities.

Challenges for Developers

Tanzu Mission Control provides cross-cloud services for your Kubernetes clusters deployed in multiple clouds. But there is still another problem.

Developers are being asked to write code and provide business logic that could run on-prem, on AWS, on Azure or any other public cloud. Every cloud provider has an interest to provide you their technologies and services. This includes the hosted Kubernetes offerings (with different Kubernetes distributions), load balancers, storage, databases, APIs, observability, security tools and so many other components. To me, it sounds very painful and difficult to learn and understand the details of every cloud provider.

Cross-cloud services alone don’t solve that problem. Obviously, neither Kubernetes solves that problem.

What if Kubernetes and centralized management and visibility are not “the” solution but rather something that sits on top of Kubernetes?

And Then Came PaaS

Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms and is not really meant to be used by developers.

The CNCF landscape is huge and complex to understand and integrate, so it is just a logical move that companies were looking more for pre-assembled solutions like platform as a service (PaaS). I think that Tanzu Application Service (formerly known as Pivotal Cloud Foundry), Heroku, RedHat OpenShift and AWS Elastic Beanstalk are the most famous examples for PaaS.

The challenge with building applications that run on a PaaS, is sometimes the need to leverage all the PaaS specific components to fully make use of it. What if someone wants to run her own database? What if the PaaS offering restricts programming languages, frameworks, or libraries? Or is it the vendor lock-in which bothers you?

PaaS solutions alone don’t seem to be solving the missing developer experience either for everyone.

Do you want to build the platform by yourself or get something off the shelf? There is a big difference between using a platform and running one. 🙂

Twitter Kelsey Hightower K8s PaaS

Bring Your Own Kubernetes To A Portable PaaS

What’s next after IaaS has evolved to CaaS (because of Kubernetes) and PaaS? It is adPaaS (Application Developer PaaS).

Have you ever heard of the “Golden Path“? Spotify uses this term and Netflix calls it “Paved Road“.

The idea behind the golden path or paved road is that the (internal) platform offers some form of pre-assembled components and supported approach (best practices) that make software development faster and more scalable. Developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel by browsing through a very fragmented ecosystem of developer tooling where the best way to find out how to do things was to ask the community or your colleagues.

VMware announced Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) in September 2021 with the statement, that TAP will provide a better developer experience on any Kubernetes.

VMware Tanzu Application Platform delivers a prepaved path to production and a streamlined, end-to-end developer experience on any Kubernetes.

It is the platform team’s duty to install and configure the opinionated Tanzu Application Platform as an overlay on top of any Kubernetes cluster. They also integrate existing components of Kubernetes such as storage and networking. An opinionated platform provides the structure and abstraction you are looking for: The platform “does” it for you. In other words, TAP is a prescribed architecture and path with the necessary modularity and flexibility to boost developer productivity.

Diagram depicting the layered structure of TAP

The developers can focus on writing code and do not have to fully understand the details like container image registries, image building and scanning, ingress, RBAC, deploying and running the application etc.

Illustration of TAP conceptual value, starting with components that serve the developer and finishing with the components that serve the operations staff and security staff.

 

TAP comes with many popular best-of-breed open source projects that are improving the DevSecOps experience:

  • Backstage. Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals, created at Spotify, donated to the CNCF, and maintained by a worldwide community of contributors.
  • Carvel. Carvel provides a set of reliable, single-purpose, composable tools that aid in your application building, configuration, and deployment to Kubernetes.
  • Cartographer. Cartographer is a VMware-backed project and is a Supply Chain Choreographer for Kubernetes. It allows App Operators to create secure and pre-approved paths to production by integrating Kubernetes resources with the elements of their existing toolchains (e.g. Jenkins).
  • Tekton. Tekton is a cloud-native, open source framework for creating CI/CD systems. It allows developers to build, test, and deploy across cloud providers and on-premise systems.
  • Grype. Grype is a vulnerability scanner for container images and file systems.
  • Cloud Native Runtimes for VMware Tanzu. Cloud Native Runtimes for Tanzu is a serverless application runtime for Kubernetes that is based on Knative and runs on a single Kubernetes cluster.

At VMware Explore US 2022, VMware announced new capabilities that will be released in Tanzu Application Platform 1.3. The most important added functionalities for me are:

  • Support for RedHat OpenShift. Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 will be available on RedHat OpenShift, running in vSphere and on baremetal.
  • Support for air-gapped installations. Support for regulated and disconnected environments, helping to ensure that the components, upgrades, and patches are made available to the system and that they operate consistently and correctly in the controlled environment and keep data secure.
  • Carbon Black Integration. Tanzu Application Platform expands the ecosystem of supported vulnerability scanners with a beta integration with VMware Carbon Black scanner to enable customer choice and leverage their existing investments in securing their supply chain.

The Power Combo for Multi-Cloud

A mix of different workloads like virtual machines and containers that are hosted in multiple clouds introduce complexity. With the powerful combination of Tanzu Mission Control and Tanzu Application Platform companies can unlock the full potential of their platform teams and developers by reducing complexity while creating and using abstraction layers on top your multi-cloud infrastructure.

VMware Explore US 2022 – VMware Projects and Day 2 Announcements

VMware Explore US 2022 – VMware Projects and Day 2 Announcements

Aug 31, 2022 | Cloud Native Apps, CNCF, Edge Computing, ESXi, HCX, Kubernetes, Networking, NSX, Observability, Security, Tanzu, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Explore, VMworld, vSphere

Last year at VMworld 2021, VMware mentioned and announced a lot of (new) projects they are working on. What happened to them and which new VMware projects have been mentioned this year at VMware Explore so far?

Project Ensemble – VMware Aria Hub

VMware unveiled their unified multi-cloud management portfolio called VMware Aria, which provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud native applications.

VMware Aria is anchored by VMware Aria Hub (formerly known as Project Ensemble), which provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment, and leverages VMware Aria Graph to provide a common definition of applications, resources, roles, and accounts.

VMware Aria Graph provides a single source of truth that is updated in near-real time. Other solutions on the market were designed in a slower moving era, primarily for change management processes and asset tracking. By contrast, VMware Aria Graph is designed expressly for cloud-native operations.

VMware Explore US 2022 Session: A Unified Cloud Management Control Plane – Update on Project Ensemble [CMB2210US]

Project Monterey – DPU-based Acceleration for NSX

Last year introduced as Project Monterey and in technology preview, VMware announced the GA version of Monterey called DPU-based Acceleration for NSX yesterday.

Project Arctic – vSphere+ and vSAN+

Project Arctic has been introduced last year as a Technology Preview and was described as “the next step in the evolution of vSphere in a multi-cloud world”. What has started with the idea of bringing VMware Cloud services closer to vSphere, has evolved to a even more interesting and enterprise-ready version called vSphere+ and vSAN+. It includes developer services that consist of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid runtime, Tanzu Mission Control Essentials and NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials. VMware is going to add more and more VMware Cloud add-on services in the future. Additionally, VMware even introduced VMware Cloud Foundation+.

Project Iris – Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu

VMware mentioned Project Iris very briefly last year at VMworld. In February 2022, Project Iris became generally available and is since then known as Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu.

Project Northstar

At VMware Explore on day 1, VMware introduced Project Northstar, which will provide customers a centralized cloud console that gives them instant access to networking and security services, such as network and security policy controls, Network Detection and Response (NDR), NSX Intelligence, Advanced Load Balancing (ALB), Web Application Firewall (WAF), and HCX. Project Northstar will be able to apply consistent networking and security policies across private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments.

Graphical user interface Description automatically generated

VMware Explore US 2022 Session: Multi-Cloud Networking and Security with NSX [NETB2154US]

Project Watch

At VMware Explore on day 1,VMware unveiled Project Watch, a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that will provide advanced app-to-app policy controls to help with continuous risk and compliance assessment. In technology preview, Project Watch will help network security and compliance teams to continuously observe, assess, and dynamically mitigate risk and compliance problems in composite multi-cloud applications.

Project Trinidad

Also announced at VMware Explore day 1 and further explained at day 2, Project Trinidad extends VMware’s API security and analytics by deploying sensors on Kubernetes clusters and uses machine learning with business logic inference to detect anomalous behavior in east-west traffic between microservices.

Project Narrows

Project Narrows introduces a unique addition to Harbor, allowing end users to assess the security posture of Kubernetes clusters at runtime. Images previously undetected, will be scanned at the time of introduction to a cluster, so vulnerabilities can now be caught, images may be flagged, and workloads quarantined.

Project Narrows adding dynamic scanning to your software supply chain with Harbor is critical. It allows greater awareness and control of your running workloads than the traditional method of simply updating and storing workloads.

VMware is open sourcing the initial capabilities of Project Narrows on GitHub as the Cloud Native Security Inspector (CNSI) Project.

VMware Explore US 2022 Session: Running App Workloads in a Trusted, Secure Kubernetes Platform [VIB1443USD]

Project Keswick

Also introduced on day 2, Project Keswick is about simplifying edge deployments at scale. It comes as an xLabs project coming out of the Advanced Technology Group in VMware’s Office of the CTO.

Bild

A Keswick deployment is entirely automated and uses Git as a single source of truth for a declarative way to manage your infrastructure and applications through desired state configuration enabled by GitOps. This ensures the infrastructure and applications running at the edge are always exactly what they need to be.

VMware Explore US 2022 Session: Edge Computing: What’s Next? [VIB1457USD]

Project Newcastle

At VMworld 2021, VMware talked the first time (I think) about cryptographic agility and even showed a short demo of a Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) enabled Unified Access Gateway (using a proxy-based approach): 

Diagram of an HAProxy with TLS Termination and Quantum-Safe Cipher Support as a reverse proxy to communicate with a quantum-safe web browser.

At VMware Explore 2022 day 2, VMware demonstrated what they believe to be the world’s first quantum-safe multi-cloud application!

VMware developed and presented Project Newcastle, a policy-based framework enabling and orchestrating cryptographic transition in modern applications.

Integrated with Tanzu Service Mesh, Project Newcastle gives users greater insight into the cryptography in their applications. But that’s not all — as a platform for cryptographic agility, Project Newcastle automates the process of reconfiguring an application’s cryptography to comply with user-defined policies and industry standards.

Closing Comment

Which VMware projects excite you the most? I’m definitely going with Project Ensemble (Aria Hub) and Project Newcastle!

VMware Explore US 2022 – Summary of Day 1 Announcements

VMware Explore US 2022 – Summary of Day 1 Announcements

Aug 30, 2022 | AWS, Azure, Cloud Native Apps, Edge Computing, ESXi, Google Cloud, HCX, IoT, Kubernetes, NSX, Observability, Security, Tanzu, VMC, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Explore, VMworld, vRealize, vSAN, vSphere

VMworld is now VMware Explore and is currently happening in San Francisco! This is a consolidated of the announcements from day 1 (August 30th, 2022).

VMware Introduces vSphere 8, vSAN 8 and VMware Cloud Foundation+

VMware today introduced VMware vSphere 8 and VMware vSAN 8—major new releases of VMware’s compute and storage solutions.

vSphere 8 – vSphere 8 introduces vSphere on DPUs, previously known as Project Monterey. In close collaboration with technology partners AMD, Intel and NVIDIA as well as OEM system partners Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo, vSphere on DPUs will unlock hardware innovation helping customers meet the throughput and latency needs of modern distributed workloads. vSphere will enable this by offloading and accelerating network and security infrastructure functions onto DPUs from CPUs.

ESXi on DPU

vSphere 8 will dramatically accelerate AI and machine learning applications by doubling the virtual GPU devices per VM, delivering a 4x increase of passthrough devices, and supporting vendor device groups which enable binding of high-speed networking devices and the GPU.

vSAN 8: vSAN 8 introduces breakthrough performance and hyper-efficiency. Built from the ground up, the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) will enhance the performance, storage efficiency, data protection and management of vSAN running on the latest generation storage devices. vSAN 8 will provide customers with a future ready infrastructure that supports modern TLC storage devices and delivers up to a 4x performance boost.

VMware Cloud Foundation+ – VMware introduces a new cloud-connected architecture for managing and operating full stack HCI in data centers. Built on vSphere+ and vSAN+, VMware Cloud Foundation+ will add a new cloud-connected architecture for managing and operating full-stack HCI in our data center or co-location facility.

VMware Cloud Foundation+ will deliver new admin, developer and hybrid cloud services through a simplified subscription model and keyless entitlement. VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 will enable VMware Cloud Foundation+ by adding vSphere+ and vSAN+, plus a cloud gateway that provides access to the VMware Cloud Console as part of the full stack architecture.

VMware Cloud for Hyperscalers

VMC on AWS – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) I4i instances for I/O-intensive Workloads: Powered by 3rd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Ice Lake), Amazon EC2 instances help deliver better workload support and delivery, lower TCO, and increased scalability and application performance. Compared to I3, the I4i instances provide nearly twice the number of physical cores, twice the memory, three times the storage capacity, and three times the network bandwidth.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Integration Availability – as a native AWS cloud storage service that is certified as a supplemental datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS, FSx for ONTAP offers fully managed shared storage built on the familiar NetApp ONTAP file system trusted by VMware customers running on premises today. Customers can now use FSx for ONTAP as a simple and elastic datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS, enabling them to scale storage up or down independently from compute while paying only for the resources they need.

VMware Cloud Flex Storage Availability – A new VMware-managed and natively integrated cloud storage and data management solution that offers supplemental datastore-level access for VMware Cloud on AWS. With just a few clicks in the VMware Cloud Console, customers can scale their storage environment without adding hosts, and elastically adjust storage capacity up or down as needed for every application. Customers also benefit from a simple, pay-as-you-consume pricing model. Together with VMware vSAN, VMware Cloud Flex Storage offers flexibility and customer value in terms of resilience, performance, scale, and cost in the cloud.

VMware Cloud Flex Compute – “Preview” of a new cloud compute model that will help customers get started faster with VMware Cloud on AWS. With this new model, VMware introduces a “resource-defined” cloud compute model in place of “hardware-defined” compute instance model which will provide customers higher flexibility, elasticity, and speed to better meet cost and performance requirements of enterprise applications. It will help customers get started faster with VMware Cloud on AWS by using smaller consumable units.

Azure VMware Solution – Customers will be able to purchase Azure VMware Solution as part of VMware Cloud Universal, a flexible purchasing and consumption program for executing multi-cloud and digital transformation strategies. VMware Cloud Director Service for Azure VMware Solution is also now available in Public Preview.

Google Cloud VMware Engine – VMware announced VMware Tanzu Standard edition on Google Cloud VMware Engine to help simplify Kubernetes adoption and management.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution – New features and capabilities with VMware Tanzu Standard Edition and introduced support for single host SDDCs for non-production workloads.

VMware Cloud Management – VMware Aria

VMware unveiled a multi-cloud management portfolio called VMware Aria, which provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud native applications.

VMware Aria is a new brand for the vRealize components, Tanzu Observability by Wavefront and CloudHealth unified under one umbrella, one name.

The VMware products and services within the VMware Aria portfolio are:

  • VMware Aria Automation (formerly, vRealize Automation)
  • VMware Aria Operations (formerly, vRealize Operations)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Networks (formerly, vRealize Network Insight)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Logs (formerly, vRealize Log Insight)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Secure Clouds (formerly, CloudHealth Secure State)
  • VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth (formerly, CloudHealth)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly VMware Tanzu Observability)
  • VMware Skyline

VMware Aria Products

VMware Aria is anchored by VMware Aria Hub (formerly known as Project Ensemble), which provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment, and leverages VMware Aria Graph to provide a common definition of applications, resources, roles, and accounts.

VMware Aria Graph provides a single source of truth that is updated in near-real time. Other solutions on the market were designed in a slower moving era, primarily for change management processes and asset tracking. By contrast, VMware Aria Graph is designed expressly for cloud-native operations.

VMware Aria provides features and functions that span management disciplines and clouds to deliver unique value for multi-cloud governance, cross-cloud migration, and actionable business insights. In addition, there are three new end-to-end management services built on top of VMware Aria Hub and VMware Aria Graph:

  • VMware Aria Guardrails – Automate enforcement of cloud guardrails for networking, security, cost, performance, and configuration at scale for multi-cloud environments with an everything-as-code approach
  • VMware Aria Migration – Accelerate and simplify the multi-cloud migration journey by automating assessment, planning, and execution in conjunction with VMware HCX
  • VMware Aria Business Insights – Discern relevant business insights from full-stack event correlation leveraging AI/ML analytics

Networking and Security

Project Northstar – Project Northstar is a SaaS-based network and security offering that will empower NSX customers with a set of on-demand multi-cloud networking and security services, end-to-end visibility, and controls. Customers will be able to use a centralized cloud console to gain instant access to networking and security services, such as network and security policy controls, Network Detection and Response (NDR), NSX Intelligence, Advanced Load Balancing (ALB), Web Application Firewall (WAF), and HCX. It will support both private cloud and VMware Cloud deployments running on public clouds and enable enterprises to build flexible network infrastructure that they can spin up and down in minutes.

Graphical user interface Description automatically generated

DPU-based Acceleration for NSX – Formerly known as Project Monterey, VMware announced that starting with NSX 4.0 and vSphere 8.0, customers can leverage DPU-based acceleration using SmartNICs. Offloading NSX services to the DPU can accelerate networking and security functions without impacting the host CPUs, addressing the needs of modern applications and other network-intensive and latency-sensitive applications.

Image of a SmartNIC

Project Trinidad – Available as tech preview, Project Trinidad extends VMware’s API security and analytics by deploying sensors on Kubernetes clusters and uses machine learning with business logic inference to detect anomalous behavior in east-west traffic between microservices.

Project Watch – VMware unveiled Project Watch, a new approach to multi-cloud networking and security that will provide advanced app-to-app policy controls to help with continuous risk and compliance assessment. In technology preview, Project Watch will help network security and compliance teams to continuously observe, assess, and dynamically mitigate risk and compliance problems in composite multi-cloud applications.

Additionally, VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer adds new bot management capabilities to help enterprises address threats quickly and efficiently, providing enhanced multi-layer application protection with existing Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, and API security.

Edge

VMware Edge Compute Stack 2.0 – VMware announced the VMware Edge Compute Stack v1.0 last year and is now adding more features and functionalities optimized for different use cases at the enterprise edge – shipped with vSphere 8 and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0. VMware, for the first time, will introduce initial support for non-x86 processor-based specialized small form factor edge platforms to simultaneously run IT/OT workloads and workflows on a single stack.

 

VMware Private Mobile Network (Beta) – Delivered by service providers, this new managed service offering provides enterprises with private 4G/5G mobile connectivity in support of edge-native applications. VMware will empower partners with a single PMN orchestrator to operate multi-tenant private 4G/5G networks with an enterprise-grade solution. 

Modern Applications (VMware Tanzu)

Tanzu Application Platform – VMware pre-announced new Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) 1.3 capabilities like the availability on RedHat OpenShift or the support for air-gapped installations for regulated and disconnected environments.

Tanzu Mission Control – Finally, VMware announced the preview for lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters, which enables direct provisioning and management of EKS clusters, which is awesome! I suppose we can expect the support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) also coming very soon.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid – With the release of TKG 2.0, VMware now includes a unified experience for applications running on any cloud. In the near future, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 should support both Supervisor-based and VM-based management cluster models. On vSphere 8, both Supervisor-based and VM-based models will be supported, and VM-based management clusters will continue to be available on previous versions of vSphere and public clouds. This means in other words, that VMware continues with their “TKGS” and “TKGm” flavors.

Tanzu Service Mesh – Also pre-announced, VMware is adding several enterprise and application resiliency capabilities into Tanzu Service Mesh:

  • Support for customer-owned enterprise certificate authority through integration with Venafi
  • Improved security with enterprise-approved container image registries, data services support, external services support
  • and a global SLO dashboard that allows developers and site-reliability engineers to view all managed service SLOs, helping with capacity planning, troubleshooting, and understanding the health of their applications.

Read more about all the Tanzu announcements here.

Anywhere Workspace

VMware unveiled how it is advancing self-configuring, self-healing and self-securing outcomes across four key technology areas that are delivered by the Anywhere Workspace platform:

  • VDI and DaaS
  • Digital Employee Experience
  • Unified Endpoint Management
  • Security

VMware is introducing a next generation of VMware Horizon Cloud that will enable multi-cloud agility and flexibility. This new release represents a major update to Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure that can dramatically simplify the infrastructure that needs to be deployed inside customer environments, reducing infrastructure costs in some cases by over 70% while increasing scalability and reliability of VMware’s DaaS platform.

20K user infrastructure cost comparison

Workspace ONE UEM’s Freestyle Orchestrator will be expanding to include support for mobile devices.

Workspace ONE support for Windows OS multi-user mode is now available in Tech Preview for Azure Active Directory-based deployments; and it will soon be extended to Active Directory-based deployments.

VMware also announced the coming tech preview of Workspace ONE Cloud Marketplace, which will feature dashboards, widgets, reports, Freestyle Orchestrator workflows, and other resources that can be imported to help customers adopt additional solutions.

Horizon Managed Desktop –  I am very excited about this announcement, because it will provide a managed service offering that takes care of lifecycle services, support, and more, on top of a customer-provided infrastructure. This will help customers that don’t have in-house experts get to value with VDI faster.

Availability

VMware Cloud Foundation+, VMware vSphere 8, VMware vSAN 8 and VMware Edge Compute Stack 2.0 are all expected to be available by October 28, 2022 (the close of VMware’s Q3 FY23). VMware Private Mobile Network is expected to be available in beta in VMware’s Q3 FY23.

Closing Comment

Not bad for the first day, right? Stay tuned for more exciting VMware Explore announcements!

vRealize Cloud Universal and vCloud Suite Subscription

vRealize Cloud Universal and vCloud Suite Subscription

May 30, 2022 | Edge Computing, vCloud Suite, VMware Cloud, vRealize

VMware announced the availability of VMware Realize Cloud Universal (vRCU) back in September 2020. vRCU is a SaaS management suite of different products like vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight or vRealize Automation than can be consumed as managed cloud services, but VMware still gives you the option to use those subscription licenses for the on-premises products of the vRealize Suite.

This flexible licensing and delivery models enable customers to move at their own pace and give them the flexibility and choice to decide, what makes most sense for them.

Use Cases

I see three different use cases where vRealize Cloud Universal makes the most sense for customers:

  • “I don’t want to deploy and maintain vRealize products”
  • Company with a lot of edge locations and no more global/regional data centers
  • A combination of the above

vRealize Cloud Universal Product Overview

vRCU includes the following products:

As always, VMware offers multiple editions for different use cases:

  • Standard – Focused on operations
  • Advanced – Adding automation capabilities
  • Enterprise – Adding cloud cost optimization, security and compliance
  • Enterprise Plus – This edition is only available as part of VMware Cloud Universal and add-on to VMware Cloud on AWS

Note: You can also consume vRealize Network Insight as a standalone SaaS service since March 2022 with vRealize Network Insight Universal.

vRealize Cloud Universal Editions May 2022

VMware Cloud SaaS Services Availability

If you would like to know where the VMware Cloud services are hosted/available, click here.

How can I connect my environment to vRealize Cloud?

To collect and monitor data from your on-prem data center or cloud (VMC on AWS, Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine) you need to deploy cloud proxies. They are one-way collectors (outbound connection initiated from the cloud proxy over TCP/433) that upload your data to vRealize Operations Cloud for example.

Paul McConnon wrote a blog about the deployment of such a vROps cloud proxy.

The cool thing about them is also, that they get upgraded automatically! Have a look at vRealize Operations Cloud Sizing Guidelines (78491) if you need more information about the cloud proxy sizing.

The cloud proxy support high availability by deploying at least two of them and linking them with a collector group.

Note: It seems that you currently have to deploy separate cloud proxies for vRealize Operations Cloud and vRealize Log Insight Cloud for example. But you can use an existing proxy if it’s vRealize Log Insight Cloud, vRealize AI Cloud or vRealize Automation Cloud.

vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager – Metering and Usage

vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager is a cloud service that integrates with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager to collect data for your on-premises deployed products. It also monitors the subscription licenses usage for your SaaS products and visualizes the consumption of all vRealize Cloud components.

vCloud Suite Subscription

What about existing vCloud Suite customers that also bought vSphere Enterprise Plus? For those customers VMware offers a combination of vCloud Suite Subscription, which is a combination of vRealize Cloud Universal and term license of vSphere Enterprise Plus. vCloud Suite subscription comes in three different editions:

vCloud Suite Subscription Editions

If you are interested in standalone vSphere subscription licensing, have a look at vSphere Advantage.

Upgrades and Add-ons

Standalone vRealize products and vRealize Suite customers can upgrade to vRealize Cloud Universal or vCloud Suite Subscription through the Subscription Upgrade Program (SUP). You can also upgrade the versions within the product.

Summary

To summarize your options:

  • You can get the standalone vRealize Cloud Universal offering
  • If you add a vSphere Enterprise Plus license to a vRCU edition (Std, Adv, Ent), it is called vCloud Suite Subscription
  • vRCU Enterprise is included when you buy VMware Cloud Universal which has VMware Cloud Foundation subscription licenses included
  • vRealize Cloud Universal Enterprise Plus can be subscribed as an add-on with VMware on AWS
Interclouds And The Future of Cloud Computing

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:

 

 

Current vSphere Subscription Licensing Options

Current vSphere Subscription Licensing Options

May 6, 2022 | Alibaba Cloud, Edge Computing, Google Cloud, VMC, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere

Update June 27, 2022: VMware announced vSphere+ and vSAN+

VMware is giving their customers more and more the option to move towards a subscription-based licensing model. In general, companies are moving away from the large pay-up-front deals and replace them with recurring subscriptions. Vendors like VMware are making a lot of investments to provide the structures, processes and capabilities to offer subscription licenses (and SaaS services). Organizations see the benefits of subscription licenses and this blog describes the current options if you want to move your vSphere perpetual licenses towards vSphere subscription.

vSphere+ Advantage – vSphere Subscription Service

Since December 2021, VMware offers vSphere Advantage in limited regions (aka Initial Availability).

vSphere Advantage gives you the flexibility to manage and operate your on-premises vSphere infrastructure while leveraging several VMware Cloud capabilities:

  • Transition from vSphere perpetual to vSphere subscription-based consumption for your vSphere deployments
  • Complete view of the globally distributed on-premises vSphere inventory
  • VMware-managed vCenter Servers (aka Project Arctic, not GA yet)

From a centralized VMware Cloud Console you can monitor events, alerts, capacity utilization, and the security posture of your vSphere infrastructure.

It is also possible now for you to plan and upgrade your existing vSphere licensing keys and replace them with vSphere Advantage, which enables you to make use of keyless entitlements. This keyless entitlement makes it very easy for customers to stay compliant all the time and to understand the current subscription usage.

vSphere+ Operations

To start using vSphere Advantage, you must enable communication between your on-premises vCenter Server and VMware Cloud by using a vCenter Cloud Gateway. This requires an outbound connection (443, HTTPS) only, no VPN is needed.

 

Current vCenter Server Requirements:

  • The vCenter Server version must be 7.0 Update 3a and later
  • Configure the vCenter Server with a backup and restore mechanism
  • Dedicate at least three ESXi hosts for the vCenter Server. (Recommended)
  • The vCenter Server must be self-managed. It must manage its own ESXi hosts and virtual machines

Unsupported vCenter Configurations:

  • Ensure that the vCenter Server is not configured in High Availability mode
  • If the vCenter Server is configured in Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM), unlink it from ELM. See Repoint a vCenter Server Node to a New Domain. ELM is no longer required because with vSphere Advantage you can monitor your entire vSphere inventory in a single pane of glass.
  • Ensure that the vCenter Server is not configured with NSX for vSphere, vRealize Operations Manager, Site Recovery Manager, vCloud Suite, or vSAN.

Project Arctic – VMware-Managed vCenter (Roadmap)

VMware introduced Project Arctic at VMworld 2021. Now it’s called vSphere Advantage. While a hybrid cloud operating model for vSphere becomes default now, it’s not yet possible to let VMware manage your vCenter Servers. We can expect that this capability will be shipped and made generally available somewhen in 2022.

VMware Edge Compute Stack

Edge Compute Stack (ECS) is a purpose-built stack that is available in three different editions (information based on initial availability from VMworld 2021):

VMware Edge Comput Stack Editions

As you can see, each VMware Edge Compute Stack edition has the vSphere Enterprise+ (hypervisor) included. Software-defined storage with vSAN is optional, but Tanzu for running containers is always part of each edition.

Note: The Edge Compute Stack includes vSphere subscription licenses.

Other Options

If you are running the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack and look for a managed service offering, which includes subscription-based licensing, have a look at the following alternatives:

As you can see, you can start small with vSphere Advantage and grow big with VMware Cloud Universal as the final destination.