4 years ago a great team of people responded to what we were starting to see over and over again: customers wanting to consume an on-premises cloud as part of a hybrid cloud.
Frequently, these customers had personal experience trying to instantiate their own “DIY” variant – picking hypervisors, picking Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), and building their own standardized infrastructure stack. Frequently they also learnt about just how hard it was to deploy, and how much harder it was to lifecycle the whole stack.
This brave set of individuals have been cloud builders now for 4 years.
They gave birth to the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud – completely oriented around the VMware stack and targeted making instantiating and sustaining an enterprise-worthy IaaS as a turnkey stack.
2 years ago that same team delivered the first Native Hybrid Cloud – targeting developers and infrastructure teams trying to build cloud native apps and build DevOps cultures completely oriented around the Pivotal Cloud Foundry stack in a turnkey PaaS instantiation.
We’re now on EHC 4.1.2 and NHC 1.4 – and there are few folks with the degree of experience, scars, and knowledge about what it takes.
It’s one thing to put together a stack and write it up. It’s another thing entirely to take a platform approach and deliver/sustain a brand promise to sustain the platform from release to release.
What have we learnt? A lot.
- Forget doing this on a set of “what ever you have” infrastructure. It’s not about the infrastructure, but variation at the bottom is insanely difficult. We quickly stopped offering EHC on “bring your own mess”. You can build a cloud on your own of course – but good luck.
- Doing it on traditional 3-tier infrastructure – even when it’s a VxBlock is still almost as hard. We have to abstract the storage using things like ViPR (adds complexity), and the very manual process driven lifecycle management of the VxBlock (and remember, we do this more and better than anyone else) through the Release Certification Matrix is hard. VMware and Dell EMC have MASSIVE customers on VxBlock, and we will continue to support them and evolve EHC – but we know that this cannot be sustained forever.
- HCI is a huge simplifier. As we introduced VxRail – we were able to make massive order-of-magnitude leaps in automation of the upper parts of the stack. It’s not a coincidence that our EHC automation on VxRail is far beyond what we do on VxBlock. It’s not a coincidence that EHC is now available on VxRack (both SDDC and FLEX). It’s not a coincidence that NHC was born on VxRail and VxRack FLEX, and is now available in early access on VxRack SDDC
- When your offer is all about LCM – versioning of elements is critical. It’s important for people who specialize in one part of the stack, the features/functions of said stack to internalize this. When you look at vRealize Automation, Operations, vCO, NSX, vSphere all as linked – how you version the whole thing is really, really hard. An example is that many EHC customers felt a long “pause” before we versioned from vRealize 6.5 to vRealize 7.x There were reasons. There were periods where you couldn’t brownfield update workflows. There were periods where NSX and vRealize versioning was out of sync. Add into this that customers needed security fixes on another interval pace – and validation of the whole stack in those periods was very hard. Huge progress was made, but also hard lessons learnt.
- We have a lot to do to simplify the lifecycle of the upper parts of the stack. There are big improvement in vRealize Automation 7.3 with out-of-the-box integration with Puppet Enterprise, and since vRealize Automation 7.2 there has been out-of-the-box integration with ServiceNow. These are critical ecosystem partners in EHC, but also what our customers want generally. That said – we have GOT to make big leaps forward together with VMware around full vRealize Suite LCM, and we have, and will. Likewise, with NHC, we could use Pivotal Ops Manager to help with core LCM – but the concept of LCM has to extend to the whole ecosystem around the stack – Concourse for example.
I want to be clear. The Dell Technologies (VMware, Pivotal, Dell EMC) technologies here are best of breed. We have more maturity about sustaining these stacks than anywhere else.
We’re continuing down this path. Our customers need turnkey cloud stacks more than ever. But together with EHC and NHC experience, as well as the joint development with Microsoft around Azure Stack has shown us something else:
- We have to embrace a more “guided” DIY path, not only maniacally follow the turnkey path. Not only do some customers want that path (“consume” at the virtual infra layer, and DIY at the cloud layer) but it creates more alignment and a faster vehicle for software releases. This is what VMware Ready Systems and Pivotal Ready Systems are all about. They assume a “consume” path for the underlying infrastructure using VxRack SDDC and then leverage VMware Validated Designs to assist customers in building their own cloud. Furthermore, as native LCM improves (see below), these get closer and closer to the value of EHC/NHC.
- We have to recognize that each of us need to do our piece – and focus on how it all comes together. VMware, Pivotal are the leaders in each of their domains – and have active efforts to refine the LCM of their own stacks. I’m super pumped about what I see coming from the vRealize team, from the VCF team. The efforts to construct VMware Cloud on AWS required (by definition) a huge effort around simplification of LCM of the stack. Likewise, the learnings about KUBO and how to use BOSH for lifecycle managemnt at Pivotal is priceless.
This is a big development – because clearly the work for LCM for each stack is best done in the team that is closest. They get the feedback more directly from the customer. They have a vested interest in nailing simplicity at their layer.
That all said – I want to be crystal clear.
Today, if a customer wants a turnkey IaaS, PaaS – the answer is EHC/NHC.
Today, if a customer wants a turnkey a cloud foundation on which they can build DIY Clouds aligned with VMware Validated Designs, and the VMware and Pivotal LCM roadmaps – the answer is VMware Ready Systems and Pivotal Ready Systems built on VCF/VxRack SDDC.
So – what’s new at VMworld on this front?
- Read here for the latest on Enterprise Hybrid Cloud
- Read here for the latest on Native Hybrid Cloud
- Read here for the latest on VMware Ready Systems and Pivotal Ready Systems.
