I have always believed that hybrid infrastructure will remain the dominant topology for most organisations; regardless of the talk about total migration to the public cloud in recent years.
If an organisation can develop the required expertise to develop for and support multiple clouds, they should pick the right cloud for whatever their application or strategy demands. I routinely talk to my customers about that and you’ll see me arguing in favour of multi-cloud for the right reasons in the following video. Spoiler Alert: High Availability is not one of them!
For many organisations, it’s about cost economics as software licensing does play a huge part there. For some, it’s just about a particular cloud that is ideally suited to the application in question. I have heard arguments about data transfer costs in the case of multi-cloud. In reality, applications and their datasets are located within the same cloud platform, which should negate that concern.
In recent years, we’ve seen VMware investing heavily in standardising the UX/UI integration for its platform and the same goes for API access. Not only that, VMware cloud is now available on most cloud platforms of note. While they integrate into their portals in different ways, a standard API structure meant it should be possible to have a super control plane to manage them all uniformly and offer standardised services.
For that reason, I have expected VMware to announce this capability for some time now. In March this year, I asked Kit Colbert about what I had in mind in an “Ask Me Anything” session.
I started by using a migration scenario (which admittedly is a tad more involved) but actually, I wanted to know if VMware is open to developing a “Single….. layer of management”. Ease of management for such a topology is always greatly appreciated by customers. Also, it should not be difficult to produce, given the uniform API structure available now.
To me, it seems like Kit almost started thinking of VMware Cross-Cloud Services before answering but then realised it’s not public information yet and so swerved in the opposite direction. 😛
It is indeed a natural next step for VMware to take on the journey to unify the cloud platforms for its customers and provide them with a standard way to consume all their VMware Cloud Platforms in the form of “VMware Cross-Cloud Services“.
Once in its final form, all of VMware’s five core capabilities will be available uniformly across all platforms. When providing unified services to its internal customers, the last thing an organisation needs is different solutions that are hard to integrate, let alone manage. Ideally, organisations want the simplicity to deploy the right mix of services according to their needs – on the right platform.
No wonder it was one of the popular announcements at VMworld this year. It’s mainly aimed at customers who have invested and developed expertise in VMware technologies. If you have such an environment and haven’t explored this yet, do have a look. This eBook should also help!
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