Hybrid cloud has been a hot topic since cloud computing itself first appeared on the scene. What would enterprises need: a single cloud, many clouds, a mix of private and public?
As the technology matured, it quickly became apparent that a wholesale shift to the cloud was rarely desirable, sometimes cannibalizing the very benefits it was supposed to deliver.
Over time, whether organically or by design, enterprises tended to implement multiple clouds. This meant their IT organizations were having big challenges in bringing together the different environments in a cohesive manner. There were pockets that worked really well but new challenges emerged: being able to move workloads from one cloud to another, or from a data center to a cloud and back again, was difficult. Organizations were in danger of recreating the old IT silos in the digital era.
And then there were apps. Apps that enabled the experiences that users demanded.
VMware recognized this early, and we developed our market-leading digital foundation to deliver a single, unified platform for a highly connected but increasingly uncertain world. A platform that provides consistency above all else – of management, of operations, of infrastructure – and one on which to build, run, manage, connect and protect apps, anywhere and everywhere.
It’s been a continuous journey of innovation, of collaboration with customers and partners, and one that was highlighted at the first virtual VMworld online event in late September. Via a series of keynotes, we refined and updated our multi-cloud strategy, showing how we unlock value from any cloud, whilst delivering improved security and simplified operations.
More than 15 million enterprise workloads run on VMware in the cloud, and more than 4,300 cloud provider partners offer VMware-based cloud services. Our goal is to offer a complete cloud portfolio, underpinned by consistent infrastructure and operations, and supporting a flexible and agile developer model.
Developers are critical as we bring together modern apps and the cloud in our multi-cloud strategy. At last year’s VMworld we announced Project Pacific, giving the ability to run Kubernetes orchestrated container environments natively on vSphere. At this year’s event, we rolled out new developer-ready capabilities to help customers adopt Kubernetes more quickly and to modernize the 70 million-plus workloads running on vSphere.
It’s all part of our focus on making Kubernetes easy to implement, and to support both developers and operations, getting apps into production faster and deliver code to any cloud by providing a developer-ready infrastructure.
Every organization is on a multi-cloud journey to support app modernization, so we announced how we have delivered on the first phase of our unique multi-cloud strategy: VMware Cloud Foundation is now available on all Hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud). We are also now even more focused on delivering the multi-cloud platform for the future, supporting any app on any cloud by delivering a more flexible hybrid cloud consumption model.
That’s only a brief summary of the ground we covered at VMworld on multi-cloud – for the actual sessions, be sure to check back soon as we’ll be publishing a list of the workshops, keynotes and breakouts you won’t want to miss.
VMworld 2020 was a unique virtual event, but throughout all the news, announcements and discussions, one thing comes across clearly – we’re here to support our customers and partners as they deploy multi-cloud to suit their business needs, and we’re doing it in a way that allows them to get the full benefit of modern and modernized applications, with the VMware tools and technologies they already know.
Want to find out more about multi-cloud? Watch the highlights of our Multi-Cloud Briefing on demand here: https://bit.ly/3oyPpwz
