Looking back at the “Top 5 Criteria to Choose The Right Platform For Your Modern Workloads” webinar. TLDR; Leverage a holistic infrastructure platform to improve operations, security, and resilience
Increasingly, enterprises are reorienting their IT capabilities as platforms and embedding platform engineering principles into their practices. Selecting the right infrastructure for modern workloads is critical, because it forms the foundations for delivering resilient, reliable, secure, and scalable platforms that business depends on. Kubernetes has matured and taken an integral place in modern workload management due to its scalability and flexibility by design. To explore how VMs and Kubernetes-orchestrated containers can work together, VMware by Broadcom hosted “Top 5 Criteria to Choose The Right Platform For Your Modern Workloads,” a webinar featuring Forrester’s Brent Ellis alongside Broadcom’s Himanshu Singh and Timmy Carr.
To set the stage, webinar attendees were asked what matters most to them when deciding to adopt private cloud. Top priorities include on-demand capacity/scalability, improved BCDR/resilience, and strengthened security. These priorities align with what Brent sees in Forrester’s research, with security, scalability, and BCDR among critical considerations in Forrester’s infrastructure surveys.
Source: from Forrester Research
Drawing on Forrester’s thought leadership, Brent explained how expressing infrastructure as a platform addresses key concerns. He emphasized that adopting platform engineering practices, ensuring compute, networking, data, and higher-order services (composite services built from infrastructure primitives) stay aligned with business needs. It requires creating interconnected platforms that can evolve over time to meet future demands. He discussed that as Kubernetes and containers become mature for enterprise applications that enterprises are “looking to be able to leverage a Kubernetes platform, standardize on it, and they also need something to deal with their VM architecture.”
Enterprises must manage a complex technology stack, and taking advantage of emerging technologies like AI requires a lot of flexibility – adding pressure for all components to work cohesively.
To support this, enterprises must emphasize on capabilities for resilience and security, backed by observability and automation platforms.
Source: from Forrester Research
Converging those capabilities into a single platform allows for consistent operations and reduces the burden of managing applications in production. Brent shared 5 considerations enterprises should keep in mind when buying or building an infrastructure platform:
Source: from Forrester Research
Going back to the audience, they were polled about their own requirements for platforms that run modern workloads. Perhaps unsurprisingly, attendees placed security and resilience at top. The platform comprehensiveness was a close second, with CapEx and OpEx costs ranking third.
Regarding the future of VMs versus containers, Brent said, “What we’re going to see is that when you’re looking at distributed applications that you need scalability for, there’s going to be a lot of investment on moving those from a VM-based architecture into a Kubernetes-based architecture so that you can shrink and expand the workload deployment as necessary.” VMware has seen these trends developing over time and has invested in rearchitecting VMware Cloud Foundation to deliver 3 key outcomes for our customers: Modern Infrastructure, a Unified Cloud Experience and a Secure and Resilient Platform.
We at VMware understand that enterprises are running both VMs and containerized workloads. A design goal for VCF is to provide the same mature unified cloud experience for operating container-based workloads as VMs, allowing organizations to focus on the applications that support their business rather than the infrastructure that supports those applications.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is a comprehensive solution for managing modern workloads, including VMs and containers. Its integrated approach to infrastructure management helps organizations streamline operations, enhance security, reduce costs, and deploy modern applications more effectively. As Himanshu stated in the webinar, “VMware Cloud Foundation delivers modern infrastructure that provides a unified cloud experience and a platform that is secure and resilient from the get-go.” VCF simplifies management by providing a single platform for both VMs and containers. It also offers an upstream conformant Kubernetes versions integrated into the platform. Built-in security features like workload segmentation and data encryption help ensure compliance with industry standards while improving resilience.
The “Top 5 Criteria to Choose the Right Platform for Your Modern Workloads” webinar made it clear: organizations need a platform that delivers flexibility, resilience, and security—without compromise. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stands out as the unified solution for running both VMs and containers, enabling consistent operations across environments. If you’re building for today and preparing for tomorrow, VCF offers the modern foundation you can rely on.
To watch this webinar, please visit this link and click here for more information on VMware Cloud Foundation.
