CTO Advisor 059 - VMware Cloud on AWS with Kit Colbert

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Wow mark, I'm a bit exhausted man. The VMworld has been a heck of a show. What do you think? You know, it has been a long show and I'm kind of sad for it to be over But also I'm kind of I kind of need a nap Well, I don't know If you're still gonna decide to go to VMworld Europe after this, what do you think? You know, we'll see. It's been a long couple of days, but I think I want to all right, so Obviously the big news of the show has been We we anticipated it, but they brought it VMware on AWS VMware cloud on AWS and to talk about that we have Kit Colbert on the show Kit Can you introduce yourself?

Sure Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me So yeah, Kit Colbert. I'm the CTO for our cloud platform business at VMware So Kit you've you've been a little bit busy this week, huh? Yeah. Yes It's exhausting. I think anytime you're in Vegas for more than two days, you're already completely destroyed But then add to it conference as big and as active as VMworld And yeah, just totally wiped barely making it through the week here So, I think my first question is what are you most excited about?

Well, obviously super excited During VMworld is a really exciting time Just meeting with customers and hearing everything they're doing and how they're starting to take our technologies and move them forward You know as you guys mentioned VMware cloud on AWS Was one of the real highlights of the show and the fact that we are now making it real, right? We announced this last year Actually between the time frames of VMworld US and VMworld Europe And then follow that up with some more details in Europe and just got it out the door here in August and then officially announced that here at VMworld and so, you know The response from customers has been absolutely ecstatic.

Just tons of excitement I mean from the moment that we announced it back in October of last year Just been continued customer interest hundreds if not thousands of customers have come forward and Asked, you know, what is this thing coming out? How can I get on the waiting list to get on it? And so we're just seeing a lot of that continue And so a lot of a lot of great customer discussions this week as I said a lot of excitement around it You know already on board a number of customers and gotten them into production So that's that's great.

And you know looking forward to continue working and you know getting many many more customers on board So last year when it was announced, I scratched the surface So last year when it was announced I scratched my head I was among some of the people that scratched my head and like, you know, I didn't come out negative said I just said That's different. That's interesting. Then as the months rolled by I warmed up to it Some really great use cases given what like one of your favorite or whether it's working with customers or something That was now to show what what's your one of your favorite use cases for VMware cloud on AWS?

Yeah, so, you know, I think You're right. I mean just getting back to that first point you made the I think it was somewhat of a surprise to many folks They hadn't expected This sort of partnership, you know between VMware and AWS to take shape, but obviously You know, we're always looking for what we can do to better Support customers and to go where they want to go And I think a lot of customers were asked have been you know have been asking us You know, where are you guys going with cloud what's your plan there?

And of course we were thinking about that as well And you know as we started talking with AWS a while back now it became pretty clear quickly to us that there really was a huge value proposition here for our joint customers and you know, basically the idea of taking the leader and Private cloud and pairing that with the leader in public cloud down to create this really powerful offering. And so So yeah, so it didn't you know, it doesn't necessarily be something with something that people expected beforehand, but kind of like yourself I think a lot of our customers Said have come around and say wow, this actually is something really really cool and something that really excites me And so, you know, I think honestly the thing for me the talk about the use case that really excites me It's a really simple one You know just that kind of easy button approach to moving to the cloud And so, you know cloud's been around for many years as we all know and there's tremendous interest to everybody Every company's thinking about you know, what cloud means to them how they can go to the cloud But one of the big challenges has been that in order to go to the cloud it necessitates a whole new set of tooling a whole new set of knowledge a whole new set of Technologies training, you know all sorts of things right to really fully embrace this It's not just you know getting some workloads to be able to execute on the cloud, but it's really about you know How do you operationalize?

applications in production because these public cloud architectures can be a little bit different and have a little bit of Different operational models than on-premises. It also means the applications may need to have been Refactored or changed in other ways. So there wasn't really a simple sort of way if you decide as a company to say hey You know, I've decided I want to close down some data centers Move some of that stuff to the cloud, you know, there wasn't really an easy way to get that done very quickly, right?

It was it was a kind of a laborious process. You had to get a bunch of engineers involved programmers of those applications, you know think through the operational challenges and And you know, it was a multi-month not longer type of effort And so what really excites customers is like now they have literally The kind as I said the easy button or maybe even a drag-and-drop Method of moving from on-premise to the cloud and that's because of the fact that You know when we're running VMware cloud in AWS It really is vSphere the same vSphere that you use on-premises.

We're able to place there and have that seamless interaction between the on-prem and Public cloud side and so that you know again, it's like you can imagine entire data center migrations happening at the push of a button, right and You know VMware handles that under the scenes, you know with with the emotion a lot of other great technologies that we have Replicate all that data over and again sometimes while the VMs even running so that's really exciting stuff for a lot of customers They've you know many many folks We talked to have been given pretty strong and strict mandates by their whether it's CIOs or CFOs Saying look you guys got to get out of these data centers.

You got it You got to move to cloud and again They're looking at time frames of months to years and now they can significantly pull that in Because of the advent of VMware cloud in AWS, so that's again one of the simplest use cases But the same time I think it's it's you know easy to to Maybe underestimate the importance of those things and the agility that gives the customers So I think one thing we've been saying a lot as we migrate to the cloud is lift and shift is not Always the way to take advantage of the cloud.

It doesn't often work So now it's like you're building a way for lift and shift to become a way To actually, you know migrate to the cloud, right? Yeah, absolutely And you know, I want to say a couple of things on that point It's kind of funny because I talked to with a broad range of customers and generally speaking, you know Many customers like this the fact they have the option To do this that they didn't have before like we're really giving them something that was more or less impossible to do This easily before and now again, it's turned into a simple API call or a simple drag-and-drop, right?

Again, like unprecedented levels of simplicity, which is totally awesome At the same time it's funny like well some customers beat us up saying you know what? You know, you guys are like too good at this too good at you know, maintaining compatibility. You're making my developers lazy Like whoa, wait, but what are you saying making your developers lazy and they're like, yeah, you know They're not needing to like rearchitect or you know do any of this or that I'm like, well, okay. Let's hold on a second So first of all I think having the ability to seamlessly migrate things is it's obviously a good thing right now to some of those people These are the guys I talked to who are the kind of cloud native folks who want to do all the next generation stuff Which I get and I you know, that's a big thing that I drove I'm still driving at VMware.

It's our whole cloud native effort. And so, you know, I totally understand that but I think one of the things that Sometimes the proponents in that space really failed to understand is that you know Obviously moving to these more modern architectures these distributed architectures these things we associate with cloud native applications You know, this is a extremely time-consuming and in fact ability to distribute application is extremely complex There's a lot of weird failure scenarios. There's a lot of a lot of weird challenges that can happen and You know, these are the sort of impediments people ran into when trying to move migrate workloads to the cloud previously and so It's not that You know, we want to say it's not like we're trying to say don't don't you know rearchitect any of your apps We're trying to say you should rearchitect some of the apps the important ones the ones that really make a difference to your business The ones that drive top-line revenue or other ways are Extremely impactful but like any you know Any established enterprise is going to have hundreds if not thousands or in some cases tens of thousands of applications And it's simply impossible to rearchitect all those in any meaningful time.

It's just not worth the effort And so, you know, we're really offering is the the ability for enterprises to say look I'm going to take a few my applications a small subset that are super super important focus on those guys for Rearchitecture all the rest of them now. I'm free to move them wherever I want, right? I can move them up to the cloud I can keep them on-premises or I can straddle and do a bit of both and that's something that they didn't really have before They didn't have that choice.

And so now we're giving them that choice So yeah, so I think it's you know, it's one of those things again That's easy to underestimate but I think is really really critical when you look at giving flexibility and choice To these companies because what it allows them to do is really focus on the things that differentiate them as a business Which of course is really the whole point of all this So I think that's a great business differentiator My question is, you know want to get just a little bit nerdy so Keith don't yell at me sure too much can I literally be motion or storage emotion a From my on-premises to AWS and back Yes That is technology that we have working in the labs today We don't have it supported publicly yet, but it's something that we're absolutely moving towards and And that's the idea right is that level of simplicity just like you do have emotion today a couple of simple clicks or a drag-and-drop Within a data center.

You can now do that between data centers between your private cloud and the public cloud And so, of course that you know, what's that's actually doing underneath the covers is Doing this kind of storage replication and get all that storage over there and then Interlacing that with the appropriate, you know, compute the emotion of moving all the memory Between the Iran from data center and your cloud as well. And so That way you can have your application really seamlessly running And And you know that entails actually quite a bit of complexity as you as you could imagine Moving a workload walls running between on-prem on the cloud.

And so, you know, there's other things that that come into play there You know ensuring, you know consistent network identity And stretching those networks and these all are all things we can do With our various sets of technologies such as NSX, which does network virtualization So, you know that we bring together a Fairly sophisticated set of technologies to enable these really really cool use cases, which again are unprecedented in the industry So you actually set up the next question nicely, which is integration with the rest of the VMware Ecosystem we learned today VMware cloud on AWS is VMware in AWS Silly Yeah, duh, but you know there we're always like there's some type of catch to this there has to be something different NSX interesting stuff around NSX and AWS king or NSX on VMware inside of AWS that I'm just getting the thoughts of Inception.

Can you talk about what customers are going to be able to do now that we have NSX inside of VMware inside of AWS? Yeah, well, it's actually yeah, it's funny because you can imagine these like really complicated things technically speaking as it turns out You know, the experience is like super easy for customers, right? I mean This is literally them going into a portal And click on a button and saying I want an entire software-defined data center and they go through and fill out a couple of Characteristics, you know how big they want how many hosts, you know some other properties Again, if you click to the mouse and this thing's off and running and we go and deploy everything for you So, you know the important thing to note about VMware cloud and AWS is that it's a managed service.

That means that VMware actually operates it for you and so, you know the customer traditionally on-premises has had to deal with patching ESX and Like, you know making sure that vCenter is patched as well and coordinating that as well as all the other components NSX and vSAN all these other components of the software-defined data center and the beauty of VMware cloud AWS Is that you know, they no longer have to deal with that, right? It's VMware that handles all that for them So we're really what we're doing is taking something that has a broad set of components and really making that a very simple interface and you know the way it works under the covers is that We actually work very closely with it with AWS and they're giving us effectively special API's into their data center What these API's do is allow us to request new bare-metal machines to be provisioned, which is kind of cool It's like normally, you know API's operate software and here API's are kind of operating reality, which is weird You know, you just call an API a new physical device appears but that's you know the the beauty of What AWS has done and in terms of their really ability to automate and scale their their environments So we can call an API we get a new host again a physical host.

We deploy ESX onto there And then we you know again in the case of a fresh SCDC we get maybe four ESX hosts Or excuse me for physical hosts deploy ESX onto all those then deploy vSAN and then deploy NSX the edge devices the the routers and so forth and the controllers, excuse me And anything else that we might need there. And so again, it's a self-contained environment fully multi-tenant so, you know, we don't share Physical hosts between two different customers Each customer has one or more of their own SCDC environments again completely segmented and separated And so, you know, we work very closely with AWS to ensure that AWS Again at a physical machine level can do that for us.

They also have really powerful virtual network underlays Again to keep network traffic isolated between the various tenants and as well as you know The VMware management planes and then what we do is come on top of that And with so NSX is actually running as an overlay on top of there Connecting both those ESX machines the workloads on them Connect out to the internet or back to the on-premises Data centers again as per whatever the customers want So, you know, there is a tremendous amount of things happening there But again, the technology is pretty similar Almost identical in fact to what you find on-premises the big difference being that VMware now manages that for the customers We manage updates we manage patching You know, we ensure security we ensure availability all those great things and that just allows the customer to To really focus on what they want to do, which is provisioning their workloads and doing things that benefit their own customers So the mark I was doing a keynote.

I was thinking This is this is kind of like software as a service providing Infrastructure as a service or is this infrastructure of the service on top of software as a service? Wow, and then the to hear that we're talking about, you know There's a software defined underlay that AWS controls then we're gonna put a software defined Overly on top of that but the end of the day the customer really, you know, it doesn't care All we know is that we're consuming a vSphere or vCenter like console And that and that from a training perspective, so let's talk about the people part of this Yeah this is not a change in operations for my people side of outside of just the Underlay and the physical infrastructure being outsourced to VMware This looks just like my existing VMware environment my VMware people don't have to learn something new Right, exactly.

Yeah. I mean you you said it was vCenter like I would say that's not technically correct It actually is vCenter. It's not just like vCenter. It is vCenter Absolutely, so I mean go back to your first point The IaaS and SaaS. I mean this is software as a service, right? Which is awesome because software as a service just gives us great abilities to really engage closely with customers We you know, we can really understand how customers are using our software The problems they have we can get real-time feedback on it So first of all the thing that I'm really excited about is our ability just to make vSphere even better That's ever been by working so closely and getting again that real-time feedback from customers But you know to your point Keith the the whole idea here is that this is vSphere This is vCenter the thing, you know and love the thing that we have, you know Hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of vSphere admins using day in and day out a seamless transition for them, right?

They won't even notice the difference as a matter of fact With our hybrid link mode functionality. We can now connect the on-premises data center with the cloud and Through a single pane of glass I should be able to manage both right through a single vSphere web client experience Be able to manage both your on-premises data centers as well as your VMware cloud on AWS data centers SDDCs and make it so so seamless and so, you know, whether it's Just you know knowing the vSphere client and how to manage that dealing with templates, you know, any other third-party tools either well Either VMware tools, you know, like let's say if you realize up part of the operations if you realize automation or any third-party tools Anything that talks with the vSphere APIs, you know, those things are still there, right?

They haven't changed at all, you know, so all those tools when it will interact seamlessly so that was one of the things that we did have a question about before the show you guys have clarified that is one of the one of the values of VMware and vSphere is this ecosystem as we looked around the expo floor all of these integrations and When we even think about moving from a to another hypervisor we get a headache because we're thinking back Monitoring Workflow control integrations with service management All of the VMware has had a long history of doing that and you guys kind of answered that for us today That stuff doesn't go away Yeah, absolutely, right and I think that's what I get one of the big things, you know, we you know, we obviously are Super excited by you know The number of partners we have number of folks that have built on top of our platform and you're right You know whenever I go down to the the solutions exchange at VM world It just gets me excited just because there's so many folks They're all super passionate about technology all you know looking at how you know They can jointly help customers VMware customers, you know operate their applications better and and so, you know It was extremely important for us to make sure that whatever we did in terms of creating this cloud service that we didn't impact those partners or those partners integrations with our software and so You know again the API Is identical between on-premises and the cloud and so that means that you know All these tools that people have built and whether that's again third-party tools things they bought But it could even be things like scripts, you know Homegrown things PowerShell or otherwise the people have built against these three API's or any other API's those things again Seamlessly translate over to the cloud and that's a real really really key thing Because it's not just about again getting workload portability, but it's really getting that whole operational model portability as well You know if you can move the workload and it like it starts up and runs But you know, you don't have visibility into it because your monitoring tool doesn't work on it Well that kind of prevents you from running in production, right?

Or if any of your other production grade tools aren't operable now Those are those are the you know key deal killers really and so we didn't want to you know We didn't want to have to deal with that We wanted customers to be able to to very seamlessly pick this thing up and start using it And so yeah, so API compatibility is a huge huge part of a huge huge aspect I think this is all really awesome and interesting I think one thing I want to know is who do I pay and how much do I pay them?

So, you know the key aspect of this is that This is a service as I mentioned that is operated by VMware And so even though we are in partnership with Amazon the customer experience is actually just with VMware in terms of you know They come to a portal to provision their STDCs They can use their their VMware IDs Excuse me the my VMware IDs To log in again, it's all integrated with their normal experience of getting VMware software Except now they're getting of course as a service as we just talked about and you know They pay one price to VMware again for everything they use so it doesn't matter You know how many of these physical hosts they provision on Amazon or you know?

What type of networking, you know input or output they have, you know Amazon collects all that data and reports it back to us and we give the customer a single unified bill So again making it super super easy both from a workload or excuse me an infrastructure deployment Management mechanism all the way to billing all the way even to customer service. So again, this is not one of those things where Customers are going to experience, you know, two different vendors pointing at each other when there's a problem There's a problem a customer will always call VMware.

That's just the way it works, right? We are as I said running this as a service. We are responsible for the SLAs You know, we work with customers on those SLAs and if there's any problem any downtime anything that's going wrong The customer calls us So again, very very simple experience for the customer you handled who I pay But how do I pay am I paying per bare metal instance per? something else yeah, great question, so Yeah, it's actually very similar to To how easy to works, right?

So with easy to you have a variety of different instance types And so, you know today we only have a single instance type as part of The VMware cloud native OS offering but obviously in the future you can imagine us producing additional instance types And so in the end you're paying on a you know, the hot based on how many hosts you have And You know what we're gonna what we want to do is set up some different offers You can pay sort of on-demand which means by the hour.

So how many hours you use those hosts? That's how much you're charged or you can also prepay. So again like Amazon that they offer one year and three year Basically prepaid options and again, we're going to do something similar for that with VMware cloud and AWS as well All right, this has been a pretty exciting episode I'm really anxious to get this kind of In the Wow, see it kick it kick the tires try and break it because the geek in me wants to break stuff and see where the integrations break because What is one thing to see it, you know kind of on the on the stage?

It's another one to get it in there and solve some real-world problems. I'm looking very much for it means that so kit Where can people find you and more about? VMware cloud on AWS actually, you know what I should say. I think we have a High-level landing page called cloud VMware dot-com Which covers not only all the stuff we're doing on VMware cloud native us But also covers a bunch of the stuff we haven't talked about in this particular conversation things all around our cross cloud initiatives So there's a bunch of information on there for all the stuff.

We're doing that's cloud related And mark What about you? How can people find you and connect with you? You can find me on twitter at Cincy storage or at my blog virtual storage zone comm or you know I'm still at a Vegas for another couple days and hopefully I'll be around in Europe, too All right, and again you can find me at the CTO advisor on Twitter actually that's where you can find the podcast You can find me at CTO advisor and you can find the podcast the CTO advisor comm Talk to you guys next episode of the CTO advisor