OpenStack and AWS vs. vCloud for the Enterprise - VirtualizedGeek Tech Talk Episode 4
Transcript
hi this is keith townsend from virtualizedgeek.com you're listening to another virtualized geek tech talk today is march the 11th on monday i finally got the rotation as tight as possible to monday it is actually monday so i kept my promise and got it closer into the week for you guys to have discussions throughout the week about our virtualization cloud computing and technology talks tonight's topic is actually something that's been boiling up in the back of my mind uh it's going to be about aws openstack and
vmware is one topic then another topic is something that's near and dear my heart to my heart and that's uh certification specifically the vmware vcp certification if you read a recent blog post of mine i had a little diet trap about uh vmware's course requirement so we'll talk about that tonight as well so for tonight's first topic we'll talk about uh amazon recently announced that they have now allowed enterprises or customers in general general to automatically create virtual private clouds vpcs within their infrastructure this is
obviously a aim at gaining more of the enterprise market the thought process that i had around this was a pretty good question was as enterprise me's or virtualization experts how do you view amazon's aws service you know you look at their offering they offer database service elastic cloud compute models different types of storage that's persistent and non-persistent when i first saw amazon service i'm thinking oh wow that's great possibly in the future i can run one of my enterprise workloads within on the amazon cloud the
one but when i went forward to it for the very first time i was a bit confused i really didn't understand the concept of non-persistent instances so you would bring up a in my mind at the back of the time of using lotus notes i'm thinking okay you bring up a lotus note server and you start putting mailboxes and databases on the server you re boot the server or power down a server and the state of the server would be gone thinking what what possible use
would i have that for that in my enterprise workloads obviously i wasn't the target audience for that type of model uh that was most definitely for a more elastic type compute models uh the netflix's the zyngas the cloud models in the world where you build applications that's around elasticity and the ability to spin up multiple application servers that are very similar that can be scripted to join a larger pool or a larger cluster of application servers when that need is uh when that elasticity is no
longer needed for the expanded use of those uh servers the instances to shrink down to just a couple to maintain the limited demand same thing for web servers so the use case was very different now amazon has kind of outgrown or trying to outgrow that developer community in reaching to the enterprise and my question that kind of first came to mind is that when you look at their product offering it still doesn't mail to the guy in the data center that needs to decide on whether
or not to buy a new snow server exchange servers application servers in general we we don't have that elastic need in the same sense that amazon developers haven't uh have had in the past our elasticity comes in a form that we needed the way that vmware currently gives it to us or hyper-v we have a exchange server or mail server that has a 100 gig of database of male database space uh maybe 32 gig of ram we determined that that system has too much ram and
we need to shrink it down to 16 gig or we need to we determine that it has not enough memory and we expand it to 64 gig so it's a lit elastic in that sense not elastic in the sense that we need to spin up more uh mail store database servers for a a huge push and then we shrink back that's not normally how we operate in an enterprise so that kind of leads to the conversation that aws is one model positioned towards developers for public
cloud then you take a look at openstack versus vmware openstack is kind of aws to oversimplify it is aws for the enterprise you still have you have a storage uh project you have a compute project you have a networking project is separate apis into your infrastructure to control your infrastructure via applications so the question again comes up how does the enterprise who has non-developer type requirements leverage a solution like openstack so you know one of the questions i posted to my twitter was is comparing openstack
and vmware comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges i think this is most definitely a situation where you're comparing apples to oranges it's aimed at two different audiences openstack most definitely aim to a company that's looking to build around cloud applications versus vmware which is tailoring to more traditional enterprise network and data center and virtualization smes or administrators who are really focused around running the types of applications that we run in our data center today so i think that's a pretty good um comparison between
openstack aws and vmware the question is where does it go long term where does vmware start to look more towards providing apis and access into the infrastructure from applications and will aws and openstack look more to managing more traditional workloads as both of their solutions mature the second topic which is a lot more fun for me to talk about is the vcp the vmware certified professional which is the entry level certification for vmware currently requires that you basically take a three to five thousand dollar course
depending on your uh experience level and uh previous certification levels of vmware basically without taking a vmware sponsored course whether it's through one of their academic providers or through one of their traditional training certification partners you cannot become a vcp this is a pretty passionate area for me uh traditionally i'm a non-traditional uh i.t student i broke into the field from just pure luck back in the 90s uh there was a big push for talent for y2k companies were stretched to get talent to do any
level i t support whether it's help desk to i t to y2k remediation needs there was just a huge crush for talent i was a pretty skilled power user that looked up into a position working the help desk at a at a software vendor i parlayed that into an opportunity to get my mcp microsoft certified professional certification which led me eventually to this career i eventually went back to school and got my undergrad and i t and a graduates degree in i.t project management but that
was all made possible because i was able to use the opportunities throughout the microsoft search certification program to self-study train and eventually obtain the vendor specific certifications that were appealing to the on to that current job market today what's appealing to the job market is people with certification skills specifically the vcp the vmware certified professional so i i'm pretty passionate about the ability for people who don't have the income the means and the corporate sponsorship to take the vmware specific course or or specified course to
obtain the vcp uh you know if i was in the same situation today making twenty thousand twenty five thousand dollars a year trying to support a family of of three or four how in the world would i be able to afford to take the course and obtain my vcp and and have i and have access to this great opportunity you know it's a great blog post a lot of i've had a lot of active content uh conversation around it i believe that vmware most definitely is
within their rights to have whatever requirement that they wish for their certification i personally believe that vmware's vcp and certification program is probably a profit center for them and as a publicly traded company they have an obligation to their shareholders to make a profit however with that said i wish they would just come out and say you know what the reason why we have the requirement is so that we can make money uh as opposed to i think kind of the fluff around it has been
that it's a way to maintain the integrity of the program i think that's really uh you know kind of a cop-out you know you look at other certification programs microsoft most definitely suffered uh an image in the late 90s early part of the 2000s uh when they started to turn out paper mcses as their and that certification lost its value in the marketplace they eventually needed to rebrand but you take a certification like the cisco certified network associate ccna uh the ccmp or the ultimate ccie
those are programs that are extremely respected within the industry and require no special classes to be taken in order to obtain those certifications i think this is something that vmware can strive to become in their certification program and i often wonder why they don't so that's tonight's uh topics hope you enjoy these uh tech talks i'm gonna keep them coming it was episode 4 episode 5 will be on the 18th you guys have a great night and see you next week
