VMware caused a bit of excitement when it let loose its ‘hybrid cloud’ team on a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session yesterday evening, to give their take on the future direction it’s heading in.

Fielding questions were VMware’s Mathew Lodge, who wrote code for the International Space Station and Boeing 777 distributed systems before becoming the second employee to work on vCHS, together with Jason Lochhead and Angelos Kottas. Of their revelations, the most important nugget was that VMware plans to make vCHS available on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means more limited users will be able to cancel their subscriptions.

The company said that it’s planning to offer pay-as-you-go sometime during the second half of this year, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to try and take on the likes of AWS with their ‘servers by the hour’ options. Rather, VMware said its service would “include billing in arrears based on actual resource consumption. Granularity will be by the minute, and will be aggregated across all resources consumed (not per VM).”

What this means is that vCHS should be able to handle ‘cloudbursts’ better – those times when users shunt workloads into the cloud when faced with unusual demand. This says a lot about VMware’s advances in data center capacity, if it can make it happen.

A second interesting tidbit came after it was asked “Does vCHS run NSX? If so, what features are being consumed today?” The team replied that NSX is used in the “back office” of vCHS, adding that it’s in the process of adding NSX to customer environments. “Expect to see support for enhanced Edge capabilities and Distributed Firewalls plus some new things we can’t discuss yet,” VMware added.

When asked “Do you plan to support cloudformation-like template based provisioning? or TOSCA standards based, either?”, VMware replied that “Right now, you can use AppDirector for template-based provisioning, and that’s part of vCloud Automation Center as of version 6.0. We have other stuff coming here, and will talk about that nearer the time.”

Finally, VMware also hinted that its trying to make it easier for organizations to shift virtual machines into more operational parts of its cloud, from its vCHS disaster recovery service. For more answers to cloudy questions of a very technical nature, check out VMware’s Reddit AMA discussion here.

Here is a video of Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman with Mathew for SiliconANGLE.tv coverage of  #EMCWorld on #theCUBE (@theCUBE)

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