In our most recent podcast, Eric Nielsen (@ericnpro) and I (@djasso7494) sat down with Lee Caswell, VP of VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit. Lee’s business unit is responsible for VMware Cloud Foundation, a complete cloud stack (compute, storage, networking and management) that runs in the datacenter, on the edge, on thousands of managed service provider partner environments and now on the hyper-scaler cloud environments of AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle and Alibaba.
State of Cloud: Laws of Physics, Economics and Land
Our interview with Lee was far ranging. Lee started the discussion by recapping some interesting viewpoints from industry luminaries such as Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s former CEO. Lee used the three laws observation that Gelsinger had articulated to set a stage for what is happening in the industry at it relates to cloud computing.
The first law is law of physics, translates to the idea that not all transactions can support a level latency where everything goes back to the cloud or even the data center. This law is major factor driving the rise in edge computing. A second law, the law of economics says that you will always pay a premium to rent so that has to be a consideration of when and where you choose to use a public cloud. The third law, the law of the land, relates to things like data sovereignty and data privacy laws which are also impacting the decisions that organizations make around where to host applications and their data.
The net of all is this is that most organizations are coming to the conclusion that a hybrid cloud strategy is the best way to account for these three laws and their implications. Organizations will need to support the ability for applications to run across a highly distributed landscape. We then went into a discussion of VMware’s multi-cloud strategy and how it supports these needs and how VMware Cloud Foundation sits at the center of VMware’s approach.
Projects Pacific, Monterey and the cycle of innovation
Beyond talking about the state of cloud and how VMware’s technology strategy addresses the need to support a highly distributed multi-cloud model; we talked about how VMware continues to innovate and evolve VMware Cloud Foundation to be the best platform for running any type of application on any choice of environment. Lee discussed the motivation to launch Project Pacific two years ago. Intended to be wide, like the Pacific Ocean, Project Pacific focused on deeply integrating Kubernetes into vSphere, allowing organizations to have a single control plane for managing any type of application.
A year later VMware introduced Project Monterey. Like the ocean trench, Monterey was intended to go deep on the infrastructure side and focus on offloading compute from the CPU to Smart NICs through use of specialized DPUs. These DPUs can offload from the CPU, functions related to networking, firewalls, AI/ML computations and much more. Lee gave some great insight into the quick cycle of innovation that is represented by these two major projects. Both were introduced at VMworld and became shipping product within one year of their being announced at VMworld.
Lee was a great guest, and we covered a lot of ground in our discussion. I hope you choose to listen in this podcast.
Get the Podcast
You can get this podcast from any of the venues below:
Additional Resources
If you are interested in other multi-cloud podcasts Eric and I have done in the past you can find links to playlists for the VMware Multi-Cloud Podcast below:
