Building and Managing Private Clouds: OpenStack, Kubernetes, and the VMware Conundrum
Transcript
yet another episode of the CT advisor podcast we're getting a pretty good Cadence out and I have a link and post that probably has about a 100,000 views at this point and it's talking about openstack and open stack not just as an alternative to VMware but kind of this idea of building a private Cloud so I actually owe Jason this podcast episode from from two VM World europees ago Jason uh pronounce your last name for us Benedict chit I I would give you a A+ on
the pronunciation of your name I wasn't even going to try Jason has been in the field he has been on the ground dealing with everything from public Cloud private clish stuff what to say but mainly kubernetes and I think we've over the years Jason we've gotten to the point where we've kind of Blended the lines between kubernetes and private cloud and while the technology conversation is interesting we'll get to that I think one of the things that's come an output of vmware's Journey to Cloud uh
this conversation around repatriation is sometimes business decision get made that we don't necessarily agree with Jon I don't know if you've ever experienced that yeah I have I mean there are sometimes edicts that come from above be it Financial be it some form of you know they deals still get made on the golf courses sometimes these things happen and management can make decisions and you've got to just live with it you got to roll with the punches um you know kind of you can get sold
a dream but somebody's got to implement the nightmare at some point that's one of the things I've said in the past you know and you got to get on with it um there's might not be what you wanted but you've still got to deliver the business outcomes right so this has happened across even back in like the early virtualization days there I remember customers that were told to get on the virtualization wagon that really didn't want to they still wanted to do things and I remember
the early days of virtualizing things like exchange or Oracle the the Die Hard fans were not into on that they they they really didn't want to get involved so you know we've been here before it's not the first rodeo yeah early in virtualization days I had a it manager come in after me after I ran a big virtualization project he reversed the project he went we were completely virtualized and he said you know this virtualization stuff isn't going to last doesn't make sense and he went
back to Bare Metal which is ironic we're in one of those phases I think and I don't care if you're a technology executive a technology practitioner the business quote unquote makes decisions that we have to eat sass is a great example of that you know you'll have marketing or sales or commercial go out and purchase and deploy Salesforce and you're left with having have to support Salesforce whether you wanted wanted it or not yeah this is you know this this relationship between you know us it
purist who have a very clear I think idea even where the business value is because this is part of our jobs understanding the business value of a technology approach and then the desire for the business to run at a different pace than it this has been a dance we've done for as long as it have have been around so I wanted to establish some baselines first Jason I think the the basic one can you kind of describe the difference between public Cloud private Cloud kind of
and this and what I call uh not in between the two kubernetes is a facilitator of the two and it can be very much used outside of either either operating model yeah and I mean so I cloud is an operating model and and that that's the that's the important thing right so with the public Cloud you're getting some you're getting this new operating model this new um way of consuming uh the technology and and it comes with a load of really nice benefits you've got you
know Resource Management that is easy to stand uh IM am and uh permissions and security and being able to talk to resources in a certain way um mostly by being able to describe them or name the resources and and talk between them and that's all operated for you um in the public model right so the big hyperscalers they run all of this they they do all the upgrades they do all the work you just consume the services and you can consume at different levels so you've
got your infrastructure as a service type level where you can run your VMS and and things and the platform as a service level and then even some software as a service and things you know that are Beyond so you've got the different levels of where you're consuming but the overall operating model is that you you can consume named Resources with a whole set of security and they all integrate in together what the private Cloud kind of tries to do is try to emulate that model um
in in your existing data centers or in your hosted data centers um with the hosting providers um that are out there the Data Center Partners and you bring the hardware where you bring the the the components together and the software that's out there is really trying to bring you that consumption model on top of these various levels of Hardware um now you don't get don't always get the same level of extraction abstraction um because not everybody's integrated in the same way like uh one of the
the posts that we were talking about where you mentioned S3 and you don't get the same integration in a private cloud with S3 as you do in the public Cloud right now and and there's there's some differences there with the IM model and the the resource naming kubernetes is kind of somewhere in between kubernetes gives you a an orchestration layer and I know it's started around containers but I'm kind of seeing it start to develop a lot more in the we're talking a lot more about
Cube vert virtualization workloads or function workloads with things like K native um it's what started as container orchestration is coming to be a bit like a cloud operator API so kubernetes allows you to have this resource recognition there is some am or some you know role-based access in there um that could be improved but it gives you this kind of layer abstraction layer that you can use in a private cloud or a public Cloud um or anywhere in between really and so if we talk about
the business side of it it seems like just a few short years ago that businesses have adopted This Cloud first mentality that thou shalt go to the cloud everything we build everything not everything not just everything we build but everything we run will go to the private Cloud what we dis I'm sorry the public Cloud what we discovered was not to the surprise of many of us the public cloud is a really bad operating Mo model for monolithic and traditional applications that are built on VMS
that pay as you go model does not translate well and we were naive to think of how much work it would be to convert these applications from these monolithic applications to these uh uh public Cloud native resources Along Came the idea of well why don't we just build a private Cloud we discovered that in that building a private cloud is really difficult it deserves its own podcast episode but the net of it was that public Cloud providers are motivated by profit to build public clouds so
all of the resources needed to build a public Cloud was available to you I show shared a short message on LinkedIn of how I interviewed for to manage to open stack team at Comcast a year later that entire team was at Walmart building their openstack Cloud there's just not enough resources and financial motivation to build private cloud in came kind of kubernetes and Cloud native foundation and they provided this in between solution to us that you mentioned this ability to run this abstracted layer uh even
if it's not true private Cloud on premises or in the public Cloud we didn't need all of that this brought up to hotton and broadcom buying VMware and VMware making the Strategic decision that they're going to focus on building helping customers build private clouds I have feelings about this because I have the Pains of early 20 12 to 2016 2017 trying to build private clouds and realizing this is not a thing for the masses for the Enterprises but one of the thoughts coming out of VMware
uh Explorer 2024 is that hoton and his team is selling this above the CTO CIO level and going straight to the business and saying you can save so much money with private cloud so that leads us to our original conversation where we're tasked with folks like us are tasked with making this stuff work so we're going to dedicate the last you know little bit of this podcast to talking about what happens when your cxo comes to you and say and tells you to build a private
Cloud what are our real options Jason for building the private Cloud yeah and this is where it gets really interesting right so you mentioned the cncf earlier and I kind of think like the cncf is a bit like going to Cheesecake Factory or Olive Garden you've got this huge huge menu um and there are so many things that are similar you got like you know the tastes of you know Italian food or Mexican food or whatever you've got the same sort of things in the cncf
you've got a huge number of service meshes or other orchestration contonment you've got security you got storage you got so many things and in business a lot of time you kind of just want that you know predefined sat down menu where someone's going to bring me these things and it just you know these tastes go well together you know and we don't have that from the cncf at this point we don't just have a really nice menu of this all works well together so as technologists
building that private Cloud on the cncf model at the moment is very similar to that early Journey with openstack you've got some teams out there that know what they're doing they've done it before they're really good at this but they're not a huge number of people um and the people are vying for that Talent across the industry when we look at the VMware side of things when VMware started in this space they did something really well they made it simple they built an army of practitioners
so I was in the early early V expert program I've been on the V ninja training when they first introduced NSX and things like that they did a really good job of getting an army of practitioners behind their technology so you could go and pick up the right number of people to go and run a VMware Data Center and that was whether that was before the VCF days um so I did this with the early vcloud director one of my previous employers we were checking between
vcd and openstack and Platform 9 and stuff back in that day and we went with the vcloud director path and that merged in and went built out to what VCF is now and that company is still running one of the largest um hosted VM Estates in in the UK it's easy you can get the right number of people the technology Partnerships the ecosystem and this is a big thing I talk a lot with other people is the ecosystem exists around VMware you've got your VMS you've
got the networking software you've got security software you've got you know all of The Big Industry alliances were all there so you've kind of got a real easy mode way of building a private data center U private cloud in a in your own Data Center or in hosted data centers you've got good access to people um and while it might not seem as the new flashy the new shiny it's safe it's cost effective because you've got access to that that technology base of users it may
not answer all the questions and this is the bit that kind of where I see that either broadcom and Hawk They can they can really fill this bit is the operating model is not 100% there in their offering um so you don't get that same level of IM am that's uh you know just in integrated you don't get the same level of resource management if you were to bring in something like S3 or you know third party storage um you know you you you've got a
lot more Hardware options and and you don't get the same level of integration as you do in a public Cloud so you've got a real nice way that they could level that up um or somebody else is going to come along and package up the maybe maybe it's an evolution of open stack maybe it's a evolution of what's in the cncf someone's going to come along package up the easy mode of here's your private data center uh private cloud in a box you know it's easy
to operate we've got lots of training we've got lots of Ambassador programs or influencer programs um and and kind of take there's like a real big opening there and I'm not sure which way it's going to go um but at the moment the way I see it with a lot of businesses is they're going to go with a path to lease resistance and and while that might mean paying some higher bills through broadcom I kind of see that working because the alternatives are just too hard
right now for anyone but the biggest businesses and I want to focus in on this too hard piece of it because it's not just the installer if you followed the openstack journey since the beginning of when rack space opened it open sourc it Circa 2012 I think I had uh I downloaded the the project I I think I got through the install and then once I got through the install I'm like okay what do I have I I didn't have anything it was it was not
a thing not to the not in the same sense after you install a Windows server with hyperv or vmw VP host with ESX or esxi at the time you had something that you could you know run VMS on you had built-in abstractions and processes open stack at that time was not that you had to it was basically you know if you think if VMware vpar is a Lego kit then uh open stack is a Lego block and you have to end up you know kind of
Designing the end solution most Enterprises as you mentioned are not equipped with that that spirit and open source I think remain remains to this day that these are not opinionated Solutions these are building blocks that you need Master Lego builders to design and build the the end solution but the thing that you know I that kind of bit me in the end what what I didn't realize is that these things are not don't remain static you don't deploy open stack or kubernetes or development platform and
just leave it can you talk about kind of that experience that you need to continue to cultivate within your customer internal customer base when you provide them a cloud platform whether you're talking public Cloud private cloud or something in between yeah I mean it it's it's actually always been this way but it was never it never kind of got noticed as much you've always had to continue to iterate and build on the platform um I remember back from my days of building Flex pods and you
know those kind of converged infrastructure Stacks there's huge amount of Maintenance um upgrade Cycles there's um improvements or just you know firmware updates and things like that so there's there's a lot of different areas where you have to keep moving but then there's also things that you have to add or change projects get retired or you know I mean especially with like some of the open source stuff um when I first kind of started in the kubernetes space service mesh was just sdo there wasn't really
much more to it than that and sto is still here today and it's you know it's probably one of the most used but you've got a lot more options and some of them just suit other people better like you know sto is still quite hard um and some of the others are simpler or some of them have new or a better integration um or a better experience and even when we look at sort of the managed kubernetes providers sometimes they will change they may have gone
with you know one one kind of networking interface flannel um and and maybe some next version round of that they're going to move to Calico you've got to keep on top of this and I mean I've just mentioned five or six products in in a couple of minutes and it's hard to keep on top of all of those things it's hard to maintain the knowledge of all of those things and keep a running system and do migrations between them like running a cloud is a full-time
job for a team you know and often a business won't have a huge incentive to there where's the business benefit to running a cloud it's not there's no direct tangible metrics you can bring back to say this was you know worth the investment um so it's it can become you know a big cost center um and it's hard to explain measure that benefit and give it back um even more so when it's a bit easier when you've got developers so when when you've got your own
team of developers and your your internal customers of software developers and you're providing functionality back to them and you're making the developer experience better it can be easier to explain away but one of the things that we've missed a lot in the modern um Stacks is for people that don't have so much of that the people that just move use commercial offthe shelf software um VMware made that very easy you got virtual appliances ovas all those things was kind of like a a bit of an
easy button for off-the-shelf software um there isn't there's some of that in the container space but not as much and you know it's harder to show value for these these kind of private clouds or public clouds when you're just using commercial off the self off the shelf software um so yeah it's a really hard one to to to prove the value um and keep up to date with and the other thing staff turnover you can train people up I've been working training some people up with
kubernetes recently and they get a couple of years of good skills and then they get more offers um and so you know their skill set is improved in such a way that they can go to the next big project and that can be a real hard thing as well turnover and retention is difficult yeah I want to respect your time there's one last topic that I'll just Rift on a little bit and that is the in between so you talked about we've talked about one extreme
cncf taking the box of Legos pouring it out on the desk building a and maintaining a private Cloud then there's the VCF the Lego kit W what there is is a gap there's a I would say VCF might get you 60 70% there for the private Cloud you have to build the rest while it's not as resource intensive as building a private cloud from SC scratch you do miss some Nuance like I am uh messes but all of these higher level attractions that a private cloud
has to have that either you don't want the vmw solution uh IE tan zoo or you want a uh you want more capability that has still has to be built you still need the talent to do that you still need the product management to do that to maintain those bits that you install yourself and you still have to understand vmware's road map or solution like VMware it's not just VMware uh their road map in where you would have to replace out the solution that you bring
in temporarily so there is a lot of thought that needs to go into private cloud a lot of us won't have a uh option private Cloud will be th thrust upon us and whether we want to build one or not we need to know these Solutions Jason if people wanted to find out more about kind of your insights and your ideas around open source kubernetes private Cloud public Cloud where where can they find that uh so I could be found in a few different discords um
on the internet there's the container craft community CCI Community um the 90 days of devop community uh I also I'm on Twitter X ja benedit and then I kind of stick to talking around LinkedIn and uh maybe get a Blog up and running again at some point uh when I get some time there um but just one last thing on that kind of what you talking about that Middle Ground And while I mentioned the container craft Community I think what we might see is the rise
of opinionated solution Stacks so with container craft Community um sted by Morgan and a couple others um what they're doing there is putting together curated and and I'm helping and test some of this out is that curated project lists so they're using Talos by S sidero Labs they're using um you know kubernetes there's open Unison there's all these kind of like curated pieces together that we see in the software development World um so I I see that with you know um opinionated software development software engineering
Stacks uh JS and things like this so I think might might see a nice kind of Middle Ground of you can have the opinionated kind of reference of a Lego set but without buying from a particular vendor and that's kind of I think an interesting place to go for the future so you hit on a really important topic which I want to make sure I reinforce which is community and the importance of having a community of folks who are going down the same similar path to
you and you brought up Discord I don't hang out in any discords but this seems to be the place that people who have these challenges meet so as uh it Executives and practitioners think about how do they solve these Solutions where are some of the places to go to have these conversations yeah I mean so there there really are so I'm in well that something happened I was in a lot of slack groups last five years or so um and a lot of those have seemed
to have migrated across to to Discord I mean even the V expert Community moved over as well um it's a little bit harder to find I've got to admit because it's uh it's not as easily indexed um but you know I have uh let me see so there's the home Ops Discord the net app Discord the container craft one there's some for kubernetes um a lot of tech influencers have them as well now um yeah raw code academy just there's one from the A7 a16z guys
yet another INF for Community um so send me a link to them and I'll I'll add to a show notes so folks looking to you know jump into a community get started ask questions we'll provide some resources if you want to learn more about the futurum group you can find us on the road on the web and you will find us on the road to we'll be at net app Insight where I will also see Jason in a couple of weeks futurum group.com you want to
find out more about the CTO advisor or fut Group Company the CTO advisor.com and you can find me on X at CTO advisor talk to you next CTO advisor podcast
