Part II: Counterintuitively Fastest Path to App Modernization
There’s an Internet meme circulating among technology teams that may be truer than we senior tech leaders like to admit. It asks: Who is most responsible for driving your organization’s digital transformation, your CEO, CTO…or COVID-19?
Regardless of the impetus, CIOs now have board-level winds at their backs to accelerate application modernization. And VMware helps with the speed and success of modernizing apps in ways that may seem counterintuitive as I discussed in an earlier article.
But first, senior IT leaders may have to get reacquainted with VMware. I say this because so much has changed since we introduced our revolutionary virtualization technology more than two decades ago.
These are just a few examples of how VMware has helped enterprises achieve more value and thrive as cloud emerged and multi-cloud adoption accelerates:
- Our core infrastructure, VMware Cloud Foundation, extended to integrate with the world’s most popular hyperscalers and hundreds of regional public cloud provider offerings as well as to the edge, proving to be an enormous asset to enterprises interested in maintaining consistent infrastructure while operating in a hybrid cloud world.
- Our consistent operations management across VMware based and public clouds and intrinsic security approaches have reduced IT complexity and strengthened security, providing peace of mind to IT staff responsible for optimizing costs, capacity, protection, and the health of their IT systems.
- Our app focus, reimagined in the new VMware Tanzu portfolio of end-to-end solutions that includes VMware vSphere with Kubernetes, helping teams build, run, and manage truly modern apps on multi-cloud infrastructure.
At each step, we have architected VMware solutions with the expectation that markets and business needs will continue to change. So when the next cool open source project, application, or service comes along, organizations like yours can quickly onboard it right into your VMware stack without interrupting current operations.
Our Unique Approach: Cloud Differently
Our solutions deliver maximum choice and the quickest time to value with the least disruption. With our digital innovation, you can architect cloud differently—not as a public cloud like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, but instead as a powerful software infrastructure and management stack that can be layered on top of any physical infrastructure in any location and can run all types of apps—traditional and modern—in addition to a broad set of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services.
VMware provides not just cloud as a destination, but cloud as an operating model that can be delivered anywhere a business requires.
Our unique approach is foundational to our architecture. Whereas public clouds are vertically integrated silos, we’ve built a horizontal and flexible architecture that lets you run any app or service of choice on any cloud:
Moreover, our approach enables your business to experience low friction, non-disruptive, and largely automated transformation across key areas. You get:
- Secure applications – From traditional to modern
- Accelerated operations – From IT Ops to DevOps
- Flexible location – From infrastructure based on cloud or a data center facility to a mix of data center, cloud, and edge, based on business need
A Multi-Cloud Capable Architecture
Our distinct approach to modern apps and multi-cloud is easier, faster, and cheaper. We expect it to have higher success rates because it enables non-disruptive evolution of infrastructure and apps, rather than disruptive revolution. Best of all, organizations that rely on VMware don’t have to choose in advance how to evolve their apps. Our architecture works equally well regardless of your path to modernization.
So how does VMware accomplish this? This graphic visually depicts what I mean, showing the integrated nature of VMware Cloud:
To dive deeper, these are some of the key attributes of our innovative architectural approach:
- Multi-cloud – Embrace a new kind of cloud that spans all other clouds at many levels of the stack—from management and operations, to PaaS services, to infrastructure and networking. From an architectural perspective, VMware’s cloud is natively multi-cloud.
- Kubernetes – Discover the power of Kubernetes in vSphere 7 (now part of VMware Cloud Foundation) to enable all of your apps to run and be managed with Kubernetes.
- App Mobility – Gain unprecedented freedom of choice about where to locate your apps (for example, closer to users or data such as edge computing or in the public cloud near preferred or differentiated services such as Amazon Dynamo or Google Cloud Spanner.
- Consistency – Maintain cost and reporting consistency across many layers of your stack while sustaining consistent Kubernetes and PaaS environments and management. Also achieve runtime consistency, and finally, network capability and management consistency—across all clouds as well as on premises.
Modern apps are the key to digital business success yet those apps require a flexible digital infrastructure for optimal user experience. As your organization and senior leaders make decisions about refactoring, replatforming, rehosting, replacing, or retiring a particular application or system of apps, these attributes become mission-critical considerations, so I’ll explain more about our VMware portfolio’s differentiation in my next article.
