This year at VMworld 2014, cloud and containerization led future plans for VMware’s management tools and show an increased presence in the DevOps of virtualization. Docker and OpenStack represent the two most present technologies developers and engineers will find added to their tool-belts with increased integration with VMware products.

OpenStack distribution for developers

VMware announced its plans to integrate OpenStack application programming interfaces (APIs) with its cloud management software, so customers will be able to run OpenStack clouds using VMware’s management tools.

The VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) will offer full integration with VMware administration and management tools, allowing developers to leverage existing VMware expertise to manage and troubleshoot an OpenStack cloud.

The OpenStack solution will be an infrastructure service costing, metering and analysis, including public cloud rate cards, facilitating optimal workload placement and transparent show/charge back along with on-demand delivery of applications and infrastructure services via a service portal/catalog or API and guided by policy – available with popular tools such as Puppet, Chef and Jenkins to enable DevOps methodologies.

The management tool includes vCenter Operations Manager and Log Insight, is primarily for handling installation and upgrades. VMware CEO Gelsinger said that the technology is enabling programmable, flexible, scalable solutions so IT can worry about the application services and enabling business models.

DevOps to streamline apps delivery

VMware’s most significant announcements about adopting Docker and OpenStack distribution has its own advantage as the company now supports OpenStack APIs and containerization, extending more choices to customers.

Another significant announcement is Google’s VMware partnership to provide support for the search giant’s Kubernetes initiative.

The open-source initiative relies on the Docker container engine for application delivery. According to Google Compute Engine (GCE) Product Manager Craig McLuckie, the collaboration paves a path for the search titan to extend its cloud presence into the traditional data center. Docker helps developers to package applications into lightweight virtual containers that can be easily moved between on and off-premise environments.

The same open-source nature has manifested DevOps phenomenon in which developers collaborate with operations professionals to streamline application delivery and the emergence of hybrid computing, where services are relegated to the most appropriate location inside or outside an organization.

According to Adam Wray, CEO of Basho Technologies Inc., the open-source platform provides a stable environment for storing and processing large amounts of information from different sources so that users can take on new workloads as the need arises without grappling with the inherent limitations of relational databases.

He said Riak is one such tool designed with distributed environments in mind. Riak hosts 80 million profiles that need to be made available to doctors on a moment’s notice and modified with an additional patient information just as quickly.