CTO Advisor 085 - VMware Cloud Services

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Today, we're joined with Milan from the GM of the VMware Cloud Services Group. There's a cloud-native group that deals with mainly containers and everything that has to do with containers. There's a cloud-platform group that is the VMC solution under the cloud-platform group. And now we're talking cloud services, which I don't know if people realize this. Even without having the older VMware cloud solution with the proper infrastructure as a service company solution, VMware is still a services, a cloud services company. At VMworld, you guys announced some pretty cool security products, et cetera.

Milan, can you give us a rundown, big picture? What is VMware services mission, cloud services mission? Sure. So, as you correctly pointed out, we have a three-pronged strategy when we think about cloud. You know, of course, the on-prem private cloud, or I would say a private cloud that increasingly looks more and more like the public cloud that customers are running. The extension of that is what you hear about, which is VMware cloud on AWS. Our service provider partners, 4,000 of them, that business is growing year-over-year 40% from a subscription standpoint.

We have certain service providers. One of them has 12 petabytes of vSAN running, right? So that's kind of what I call as taking the operating environment that you know on-prem and simply providing the same extension on a service provider partner or VMware cloud on AWS. But we also understand, and you talk about this quite a bit, which is there is this thing called the native cloud. Right. The large public cloud providers and customers are starting to drive new application deployments, in some cases, lift and shift into these native clouds, so AWS, Azure, Google is coming up.

I start hearing about things like Alibaba. And so if you kind of project things out, how does a customer manage, secure, and operate this multi-cloud environment? And so as VMware, we started on this journey of cloud services 18 months back. And the idea is to deliver a set of services delivered from the cloud that help our customers not only manage their hybrid, you know, VMC service provider plus on-prem, but also native in a consistent manner. So you mentioned some really big companies, you know, Alibaba.

Most of us in the VMware community work for medium, small, medium businesses. What services can we look towards in that portfolio of services to say, you know what? VMware is solving some real problems for me. Let me take a look at these services. Yeah. So, you know, I think everybody's excited about what VMware Cloud on AWS brings, this idea of a one-click cloud if you're a VMware operator. But from a cloud services portfolio standpoint, I think if you take our existing base of customers who are also now expanding to a native cloud, one service that comes to mind is Network Insight.

Network Insight is the same offering as a service, which is we realize Network Insight as a product. Oh, really? Except it is delivered as a service. And why is this interesting? So I was just in a conversation with eight odd customers who were saying, hey, you know, we have an environment on-prem, we want to monitor it from a flow standpoint, a security profile standpoint. But increasingly, when I go to a cloud, even using Direct Connect, I want to understand what connections are coming back into the data center, see it visually.

If my developer or my line of business is creating security groups or policies in the cloud, I want to know if they are compliant, if they are by the rules that we are governing by. I want visibility into that. And Network Insight essentially provides you with the tool that not only helps you manage your private cloud, your hybrid cloud, but now also your native cloud, starting with AWS and Azure to come. And so Network Insight, I think, is a very interesting opportunity for our customers to get on-demand kind of visibility and analytics from a network and security operations standpoint.

So I think one of the reasons to highlight why this is important, I talked to Paul Fazone right before I talked to you, and one of the things we were talking about was PKS and all the things that VMware admins have to now be concerned with. 5, I just concerned myself with operating systems, some networking, and some storage. For the most part, the storage team reported to a completely different group. I just requested storage, and then I had to attach that to my ESX cluster.

And how the storage stuff, the LUNs and all that happened in the background, I really didn't concern myself with. As the silos have collapsed, vSphere has really started to fulfill the promise of the software-defined data center. I can buy a four-node cluster from my favorite HCI vendor and basically have a data center and a four-node cluster that includes complex networking, extremely enterprise tier one grade storage, and now I'm looking at stuff like PKS and adding more services to that. I'm adding more value to the business without needing to know the deep level details.

So when I look at something like a Network Insight, I'm thinking, man, I'd love to have that, but I have no time for it. I just have no time to get yet another management control plane to the stack. That's why when a lot of people look at VMware Cloud on AWS, they think, wow, vSphere? I get vSphere, but I get none of the management concerns of managing vSphere. Is that the same intent with products like Network Insight and other VMware products?

Do you take these traditional VMware products and, for lack of a better term, it's a term in NFI, sassify the product? I think sassification is one element of it, which is making it a service, but that's not enough. I think if we just took an on-prem product and sassified it and made the same product available as a service, it will have a run, I would say, but to truly operate in a multi-cloud, you need to rethink the paradigm. I look at something like a Network Insight as the way we will operate and monitor infrastructure going forward.

Like I said, a simple thing like I have VPN connections to multiple clouds right now. What's coming back? What's going on from an end-to-end flow or an application standpoint? If there's a security group violation, am I hitting the limits of AWS for security groups? How do I get all of that in a very simplified manner? And then if you look at that interface, it's a natural language query-based interface. You don't need to be a jockey in being a network nerd or a security nerd or a compute nerd.

You can actually ask questions with natural language to do that. Similarly, AppDefense is another solution, cloud service, that changes the paradigm of how we think about security in a multi-cloud world. Instead of thinking about chasing what are the attack vectors and threat vectors, what if we could basically fingerprint the good state? This application is known for this behavioral pattern. Let me fingerprint it, and now I'm going to monitor the good behavior. And if I see deviations in that, let me alert on that.

And if you had that as a service where you just point-click, it starts working, starts instrumenting and analyzing it, that's the new world. And so it's not just, like I said, SaaS-ifying the product. It's also bringing new constructs to market, like AppDefense, like how NI thinks about it from a simple natural language, which is why I think this paradigm is interesting and I think our customers should be looking at it. So as we talk, let's expand that conversation out to that hybrid infrastructure, what I call where I have private cloud or private infrastructure, and I have to integrate with SaaS and cloud services.

Everyone, small businesses up to large businesses, have a hybrid infrastructure, whether you have to integrate with something as simple as Workday to VPCs or VMware Cloud on AWS, we have these complex networks. With that comes complexity with services that I never had, as a VMware admin, that was always someone else's concern. But now when I have VMware Cloud running in AWS in another data center, not just another data center, but a cloud provider's data center, how do I rethink services like SD-WAN? You know, you guys, it may not fall on your group, but you guys acquired VeloCloud.

So naturally I'm thinking, well, when I talk to the VeloCloud guys, they have stuff in AWS. Are you guys, is this stuff on a roadmap to integrate those offerings and give me even more insight in a network insight service versus what I can do on my own or the effort that it would take for me to do on-prem? Great question. So I think if you break down the problem into two elements, one is the end user who is trying to connect to these different SaaS services, in this case, Office 365, Concur, or name your SaaS tool of choice.

And what we've done with our Workspace ONE and AirWatch solution is, and I'll give you my experience. com, and I get a catalog of SaaS services available to me. I click, single sign on, fully authenticated, fully monitored. That's what our kind of EUC Workspace ONE portfolio brings to our customers, which is end user, whether you're coming from a mobile device or you're coming in from a laptop, you essentially can connect to a SaaS service seamlessly from an end user experience standpoint. On the other side of it, though, is infrastructure.

And if we look at who we've been working with, it's been about, hey, you've got your infrastructure, you've got SDDC, but now you have to connect these different centers of data, your data center with a VMC center of data, maybe with a partner center of data, like a colo with a native cloud. So what we have right now is for vSphere-based clouds, we have HCX, which essentially provides you with a connect at layer two or layer three, very seamlessly as a service. And for customers who are looking at migrations, right, I'm going to shut down this data center and move to VMC, or shut down this data center and move to another data center of mine, HCX provides a seamless way for you to move vSphere-based workloads, either live, vMotion, or shut down and start across large distances in a very seamless manner, right, optimized, secure, and it's fully delivered as a service.

So let's talk about this fully delivered as a service piece, how I consume, how do I buy any of these services? First off, let's talk about the infrastructure, because we're geeks and we like to talk about infrastructure, is are these services deployed in my, let's say it's an AWS VPC, and I pay for both the AWS EC2 charges and the service, or do you guys deploy it in your own VPC? What does deployment and cost look like? Sure. So our service, we operate it in, depending on the service, we would run it in the native cloud, so you don't need to worry about how we operate and run it from a cost standpoint.

And then when you need to run the service, it's essentially a subscription model, so you would attach the service to, in the case of NI, it's based on vCPUs, which is how most of the transactions take place in the cloud. But in the case of cost, it's a percentage of your cost profile. And so it's varying depending on the service, but the way we are doing this is, you essentially have a model, first things first, you can trial the heck out of it.

com, you log in, I want to try this service out, we have nine services out right now, you can try each one of them for a period of time for free. So there is a trial period. If you like it, you move to a subscription model, you can either do it on demand, so you're paying it as you use it, or you can say, you know what, I love this service, I would like to do a one-year commit or a three-year commit. Of course, based on your commitment level to the solution, the numbers get more and more optimal.

So how do I find out more about cloud services at VMware? You've only talked about two, AppDefense and NI. Is there any others? Yeah. So, you know, we have nine services, and I'll kind of walk you through kind of value prop, right? So we talked about NI as this kind of cross-cloud monitoring tool from an infrastructure standpoint. And then AppDefense as this new way to kind of drive security, starting with vSphere, but going to native. We have HCX, which allows you to connect all these different clouds and move workloads around transparently, very easily in that.

And then Cost Insight, which essentially allows you to understand your cost elements. So a simple example is, I'm running on-prem, and I have an application, and I want to move it to VMC. You know, what would that cost profile look like, right, because I'm going from something that I'm running on-prem to a public cloud, which is subscription. Does it even make sense? Or I'm running in AWS, am I running the application optimally? That's what Cost Insight does. Sounds like VROps on steroids.

It's more from a cost standpoint. Right. But from, right. And so there's Cost Insight, but I would say, you know, of all these services, one hidden gem that I don't think a lot of you know about is Wavefront. An acquisition we made, has it been six to nine months back or a year ago? And it made its mark working with the large SaaS providers, right? So if you look at the customer profile for Wavefront, it's all the large SaaS providers we talk about, Workday, Box, and others.

They are using this to build their app, operate their app, and run their apps, right? And so what Wavefront brings is to your developer or to IT, a cloud-scale monitoring tool. An example of this is one customer is sending 500,000 metrics per second into Wavefront right now. Wow. That's massive scale. Yes. So it's a real-time cloud-scale platform for monitoring not only your apps, so application monitoring, but we have built-in plugins into AWS, so you can monitor Lambda. You know, you were in the network and you know how hard I was on you guys about Lambda.

So that's a great feature. Right. So you've got Wavefront, which I think is a cloud-borne solution that we have. I think as somebody who's looking at VMware, definitely look at that tooling because it's the cloud-scale operations tool, which will help your developers, but it also helps applications. And then there are pieces that tie back into infrastructure where we are bringing that NI, working with Wavefront, working with VROPs as kind of this consolidated story across the board. So there are others.

You know, NSX is an example where NSX is now available on AWS, Azure is coming soon. And so across the portfolio now, we have nine services up and running. If you weren't already overwhelmed by the number of services VMware offers now, you should be overwhelmed. So there's a lot there and a lot to take into consideration. And if you want to learn more about VMware services, where can they find it in the... com. com. Sounds fairly simple. Talk to you next virtual event.

You can follow me on the web at ctoadvisor. com. Milan, are you on the Twitters at all? Yeah, at VirtualVellum. All right. Talk to you soon. Thank you.