In episode two of the recently created Multi-Cloud Podcast, Eric Neilsen and David Jasso speak to Emad Benjamin, Chief Technologist of Applications Platforms. The three explain how VMware is architecting and building out a next-generation multi-cloud application runtime.
Eric Nielsen (@ericnipro) and I (@davidj7494) have just released a new podcast looking at how VMware is architecting and building out a next-generation multi-cloud, application runtime. This is the next installment of our series examining VMware technologies that support architecting a multi-cloud environment. Here are the links to the newest podcast.
Our guest on this podcast was Emad Benjamin,a Senior Director within VMware’s Office of the CTO and also our Chief Technologist of Application Platforms. Emad is leading efforts to design and build an application platform capable of supporting applications running across any number and any combination of cloud types including private clouds, hybrid clouds and native public clouds such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Supported applications can be traditional, VM-based apps; cloud-native, 12-factor apps; or hybrid apps that are a mix of both.
The podcast highlights a white paper that Emad spearheaded that talks about the challenge organizations face along two fronts: achieving performance objectives for their applications and using cloud resources cost-effectively. In our discussion, Emad points out that many teams went to the public cloud believing that this would solve both issues. Instead, they found a divide between operations and application development. This divide was causing performance misses and inefficient resource use, which persisted and in many cases got worst.
As cloud-native applications have come to the forefront of how most organizations now build new software, application development teams thought that at long last there was a real solution to the aforementioned problem. However, as teams have begun to scale up cloud-native applications from early demo projects to full-blown, mission-critical apps – the twin-headed dragon of poor performance and poor resource usage has begun to plague these deployments as well.
On the podcast, Emad describes how he and other members of VMware are taking a two-pronged approach to solving this deep-seated problem; addressing both technology requirements but also people and process issues as well. On the technology front, the team has been sponsoring and executing on a set of lab projects focused on building a set of controllers that can ensure application performance and the efficient use of resources across a multi-cloud environment.
From a people and process perspective, Emad discusses the emergence of a new role: the application platform architect. This role works at the intersection of application feature code, application runtime and infrastructure as code technologies.
We had a great discussion and a lot fun talking to Emad. We hope you listen to and enjoy the podcast. As always, if you have ideas on topics you would like to see us address in the future or any feedback at all let us know.
Looking to better understand VMware’s unique approach to multi-cloud architecture? Get the definitive guide here.
