As VMware vCloud Director celebrates its 10th birthday, we trace how VMware’s cloud delivery platform has kept evolving to help Service Providers maintain a profitable and relevant portfolio.
Moving in the right direction
Starting life as a platform for enterprises to build multi-tenanted private clouds, vCloud Director was initially embraced by hosting companies as a means to size and resell VMs. In 2012, a new edition enabled Service Providers to interact with 3rd party clouds like AWS and Azure; while its API interface was replaced by a simple UI. In 2016, VMware NSX integration proved a game changer, as vCloud Director evolved into a powerful set of tools on which Service Providers could build their businesses. Its intuitive UI was now easy to brand and customize, and gave Service Providers granular control over the services they exposed to customers. As demand for IaaS began to wane, Service Providers now had a hassle-free means to offer profitable and differentiated managed services using vCloud Director. 2018 bought greater extensibility, enabling cloud providers to add their own custom service offerings to vCloud Director
Keeping it in the family
Fast forward to 2020, and vCloud Director enters a new decade with a new name (VMware Cloud Director) and a new sibling – the SaaS-based “VMware Cloud Director service”. The new SaaS offer gives existing users a faster way access to new capabilities like multi-tenanted VMware Cloud on AWS, as well making it easier for new Service Providers to get onboard. 2020 saw more unique innovations in VMware Cloud Director delivering application PaaS services with Bitnami and 3rd party applications, enhanced reporting, metering and billing capability as well as Object Storage support.
Forward-looking
So what’s next VMware Cloud Director? An exciting new portfolio of cloud native service integrations looks set to enable Service Providers to appeal to the increasingly important developer and DevOps communities. The future looks exciting!
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