TechTalks With Tom Smith: VMware Courts Developers

I had the opportunity to attend VMworld 2019 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. During the initial keynote, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware shared his vision for an essential, ubiquitous digital foundation where we have an exponential impact on people and the planet. According to Pat, technologists who master the multi-cloud environment will master the next decade. And he sees Kubernetes (K8s) as the ubiquitous infrastructure that connects developers and IT operations. K8s is more like improvisational jazz than container orchestration.

Joe Beda, Principal Engineer at VMware, and the original committer to K8s while at Google, sees K8s as a "Goldilocks" solution facilitating work and collaboration between operators and developers. It accelerates how developers get their work done on any infrastructure with flexibility.

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VMware is going "all-in" with K8s, having acquired Bitnami, Heptio, and Pivotal, and they introduced VMware Tanzu, a portfolio of products and services to transform the way enterprises, and their developers and IT ops teams, build, run and manage software on K8s.

This includes a technology preview of Project Pacific—focused on transforming VMware vSphere into a K8s-native platform in a future release; and VMware Tanzu Mission Control—a single point of control from which customers will manage all their Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they run. With the recently announced agreement to acquire Pivotal, used by more than five million developers and more than 75 million Spring Boot downloads per month, VMware is positioned to deliver a comprehensive enterprise-grade K8s-based portfolio for modern applications.

“Organizations are seeking a partner to meet them where they are today and guide them as they move to modern applications,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. “We’re positioned to help customers succeed along each step of their journey—building their applications with the addition of Pivotal’s developer platform, tools and services; running their applications with the groundbreaking Project Pacific which will transform vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform; and managing their growing Kubernetes footprint across environments from a single control point with VMware Tanzu Mission Control.”

Tanzu will give developers freedom with APIs and self-service, while IT gets vision and control and hopefully promote the collaboration necessary for a successful DevOps culture and methodology to solve enterprise business problems.

Further Reading

DevSecOps Keys to Success

Kubernetes Evolution