Editor’s note: On February 26th, 2019, VMware renamed VMware PKS to VMware Enterprise PKS. To learn more about the change, read here.
At this year’s VMworld, several of our joint customers with Pivotal shared their stories during sessions, panels, and keynotes. These real-world experiences and learnings are always the most valuable information to current and potential users of our products. Here is a brief summary of the sessions that may be helpful for those who want to learn more about our products through real-world use cases.
National Commercial Bank of Jamaica (NCB) at VMworld 2018 US General Session
Ramon Lewis, CIO of National Commercial Bank of Jamaica, joined Sanjay Poonen, COO, VMware Customer Operations, on the main stage at the VMworld 2018 US day 2 general session. Ramon discussed the digital transformation journey that NCB is currently taking to become the Caribbean's first digital bank, and why they chose VMware PKS as the heart of the process in building agile applications to ensure the innovation, transformation, and business growth of the organization. The integration with NSX and the enterprise-grade security features made VMware PKS NCB's ideal choice. Watch the full session here: https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/21607
Playtika at VMworld 2018 Europe General Session
At VMworld 2018 Europe, Sanjay kicked off the second day in conversation with several customers who are on the digital transformation path. Erez Rachmil, VP of IT and R&D at Playtika, a leading mobile gaming company with 22 million monthly active users, talked about its container journey with VMware. Playtika chose VMware PKS as its container platform for the strong operational capabilities and the close integration with VMware management suite, while maintaining the flexibility of container and Kubernetes — a win-win situation for Playtika, according to Erez. Watch the general session here: https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26720
T-Mobile on Running VMware PKS in Production
James Webb, technical staff for T-Mobile, partnering with Merlin Glynn, product management for VMware PKS, delivered a deep dive session on T-Mobile’s Kubernetes journey with VMware PKS. As T-Mobile’s platform engineering group supporting customer-facing platforms such as Pivotal Application Service (PAS) and open source Kubernetes, James and his team were actively looking for and evaluating on-prem Kubernetes offerings early this year in response to a request by the DevOps team for on-prem containers. Both the infrastructure team and DevOps team had a list of requirements outlining high availability, scalability, automation, integration, configurability, native Kubernetes experience, persistent storage, HTTPS experience, and TCP ingress- they ended up selecting VMware PKS as the on-prem Kubernetes solution for T-Mobile to run its production container workloads. James shared T-Mobile’s VMware PKS architecture as well as the challenges and solutions of running VMware PKS in production. Watch the session here: https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26336
Swisscom, Priority Payment Systems, and NCB Panel at VMworld 2018 US
At VMworld 2018 US in a panel moderated by Paul Dul, Product Management for VMware PKS, customer representatives from Priority Payment Systems, Swisscom and National Commercial Bank of Jamaica (NCB) shared their deployment stories and traced the steps they took in their container journey. They explained their motivations for choosing VMware PKS and provided insights into the types of workloads that landed on containers and Kubernetes.
Jeff Levy, VP of Cloud Platforms from Priority Payment Systems, mentioned that in their quest for agility, developers took the lead in choosing the software architectures that helped them to deliver feature velocity. They transformed monolithic .Net applications and refactored them into microservices. Nesta Campbell from NCB said that digital transformation helped the bank provide a richer end-to-end digital banking experience to customers and the results were significant. VMware PKS and Kubernetes provided the automation and orchestration building blocks that helped accelerate delivery of cloud native applications onto the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). Swisscom VP, Stephan Massalt, shared his challenges of transforming traditional telecom infrastructure and adopting containers when some infrastructure was not virtualized. He also discussed the use of both PaaS and Kubernetes/CaaS at Swisscom and characterized the types of workloads that were suitable for each environment. Click here to watch the session recording: https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/18544
Orange Business Services (OBS) session on VMware PKS
Thierry Chaumeron, business owner of the private and hybrid cloud solutions at Orange Business Services, delivered a breakout session at VMworld 2018 Europe around how VMware PKS helped service providers like OBS offer Kubernetes as a Service to their customers. Thierry shared the reasons why OBS selected VMware PKS as the platform for building their Kubernetes services, as well as the VMware PKS technical architecture that they adopted. VMware PKS was chosen for its strength in high availability, automation, self-service, as well as its built-in integration with VMware products such as NSX-T, v-Center, vROPS and vRLI. These advantages enable OBS to deliver a multi-tenant, self-service Kubernetes environment managed by OBS at the same production-grade quality as the rest of the private cloud. Watch the recording here: https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26721
VMware and Pivotal, in conjunction with Google, announced VMware PKS just last year and together with Dell, delivered an integrated solution designed to operationalize Kubernetes for 7×24 production use. Together we are helping enterprises deploy and orchestrate containers, not only on vSphere, but also on native AWS, GCP, and Azure which is coming next year. With NSX integration and Wavefront and vRLI support, we have simplified Kubernetes and look forward to delivering more innovations next year.
