Platform virtualization has traditionally involved abstracting application access to hardware resources, such as compute power, storage drives, random-access memory and I/O bandwidth.

The next evolutionary step is to move up the stack, virtualizing application access to software resources, especially runtime engines, algorithm libraries and functional application programming interfaces. In a cloud-native world, this trend is best exemplified by the astonishing speed at which containerization and serverless technologies are being adopted by information technology professionals.

Kubernetes, in particular, is key to the trend under which platforms are being virtualized up the software stack. Kubernetes enables development, deployment, orchestration and management of containerized microservices across multicloud ecosystems. As such, it’s a foundation for the new generation of artificial intelligence and machine learning, storage and data management, and other cloud-native services that run on top of virtualized hardware platforms across clouds. Serverless comes into the picture as an increasingly popular approach for making containerized services accessible to programmers through lightweight, event-driven and stateless interfaces.

Kubernetes is the front line of the cloud wars, and the public-cloud providers have all made sizable bet-the-business investments in this open-source technology. Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and IBM Corp. all have their respective Kubernetes engines, as do Red Hat Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and others. In an industry shifting inexorably toward the public cloud, VMware Inc. finds itself increasingly challenged to distinguish its own cloud application ecosystem offerings from those of such partners as AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM.

The strategic challenges for VMware in this competitive arena are twofold:

• Align with its public cloud partners’ various Kubernetes directions: As a public-cloud partner par excellence, VMware must continue to beef up the platform-as-a-service offerings that it provides for customers who run VMWare Cloud’s hypervisor technology in a partner environment such as AWS EC2. That explains why VMware followed last year’s launch of its AWS partnership with a wide range of platform-as-a-service offerings related to big data analytics, application and workload migration, data compression and protection, DevOps and troubleshooting.
• Build a differentiated Kubernetes platform in which its own partners can flourish: VMware must also provide a distributed application services environment into which its own ISV and other partners can add value with their own development, analytics, cybersecurity, workload management and other offerings. Otherwise, VMware partners, such as Rackspace, might see little value in aligning themselves to the vendor if doing so limits their opportunity to serve the broader ecosystem of customers that are moving up the stack to the Kubernetes, serverless and other next-generation cloud-native app services provided by AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud and the like. That explains why there were some misgivings from existing VMware partners when it announced its strategic alignment with AWS a year ago.

VMware has not slacked off its intention to continue deepening its integration with the leading public cloud providers, and Wikibon expects more announcements along these lines at the upcoming VMworld 2018 conference, which will take place Aug. 26-30 in Las Vegas. But it is also focusing on enhancing its own rigorously multicloud Kubernetes environment so that it won’t become siloed across its public cloud partners, which will help ensure that its own application-level solutions and those of its partners can address the full range of private, public, hybrid and multicloud scenarios. In that regard, VMware made two important Kubernetes-related announcements in the past year and is very likely to deepen its investment in these to help it address application ecosystem opportunities going forward:

• Launched its core multicloud Kubernetes engine: VMware this year launched Pivotal Container Service, dubbed PKS. This managed service, which supports the new Kubernetes 1.11 release, enables creation and orchestration of software containers across both public and private cloud environments. In June, VMware added to PKS features for developer productivity and, though incorporation of Kubo open-source code, enhancements addressing such IT management requirements as high availability, management and operations, networking and security. Currently in version 1.1, PKS enables enterprises to migrate applications to and from VMware VSphere as well as from Google Cloud Platform. It also integrates with VMware’s Log Insight product to provide users with greater visibility into containers running on PKS, through traceability and monitoring features enabled by intelligent data tagging. And it integrates VMware’s open-source Harbor container registry, which supports secure management and deployment of container images.
• Introduced multicloud Kubernetes as an as-a-service offering: VMware also brought Kubernetes container orchestration to multiple public cloud platforms, announcing the availability in beta of its new VMware Kubernetes Engine. The service, which complements PKS, is currently available only on AWS (in native EC2 instances) but will soon be launched on Microsoft Azure and additional third-party cloud environments. Available in the VMware Cloud Services portfolio, the service enables management of multiple Kubernetes clusters with improved load balancing, system administration and security. It continuously evaluates the security, health and size of Kubernetes clusters and remediates any deviations from user-administered policies and service-level agreements. It provides DevOps administrators with a set of preconfigured “smart cluster” types to choose from, incorporating more than 50 different configuration settings to address cluster-management security, availability, storage management and other best practices for Kubernetes and AWS into a simple choice, given your service-level objectives.

Leveraging its installed base in the hypervisor market is strategically critical for VMware as it moves up the stack into Kubernetes-based cloud application services. It has built a substantial and lucrative platform virtualization business, grounded in the hypervisor technology that it pioneered 20 years ago as the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. However, it faces competition in this, its core market, from many of its partners in the public and hybrid cloud arenas, including AWS (AMI, KVM and Xen), Microsoft (Hyper-V), Google (KVM), IBM (PowerVM), Oracle (VM Server) and Red Hat (KVM).

Ensuring that the new Kubernetes capabilities are a transparent add-on its flagship hypervisor platform, VMware earlier this year updated its vSphere Integrated Container Platform to accelerate deployment and streamline management of containers inside virtual machines running on VMware’s flagship vSphere virtualization platform. The platform allows IT administrators to monitor and manage these containers via the vSphere Web Client. It enables control of virtual container hosts for creating and controlling container services. It provides access to the Docker API, can hold container images downloaded from the Docker Hub and supports creation and deletion of virtual container hosts directly from the vSphere client interface.

As it gives existing hypervisor customers tools to bring their VMs into the container world, VMware is also building hooks into its stack to ensure that developers can tap into its applications services through serverless interfaces. To that end, earlier this year, VMware released Dispatch, the open-source serverless framework that it announced at VMworld 2017. Dispatch is a framework for managing serverless-style applications, which are typically stateless, event-driven and lightweight. Dispatch provides tools and services to deploy and manage production-ready serverless applications in any environment that runs Kubernetes, including but not limited to VMware’s own Kubernetes engines.

VMware has committed to enhancing and evolving Dispatch through engagement with the open-source community, and Wikibon expects announcements in this regard at VMworld 2018. In the blog post in which it was announced earlier this year, VMware indicated that it plans to integrate its interface with one or more third-party functions-as-a-service environments going forward, including possible public cloud service offerings such as AWS Lambda.

As it attempts to move up the application stack and compete with the big public cloud providers, VMware will need to go beyond simply virtualizing microservices through containers and serverless. If it hopes to offer the core of what big public cloud providers all offer, it will also need to:

• Provide ability to manage stateful containers and transactional semantics to its end-to-end hybrid-cloud portfolio;
• Add support for the open-source Istio service mesh microservice management architecture that is beginning pick up steam among public cloud providers such as IBM and Google;
• Automate more of the management of its end-to-end platform — at the hypervisor, containerized and serverless levels — through AI-driven hybrid-cloud management tooling;
• Expose serverless interfaces to Kubernetes orchestrated microservices for easy, lightweight development;
• Acquire or develop next-generation data platforms, perhaps based on blockchain;
• Offer more partner-focused solution accelerators, beyond the cybersecurity and workplace transformation offerings that it has added to its portfolio over the years to add more vertical industry solutions to its revenue mix.

Strategic moves such as these would help to diversify VMware beyond the substantial revenue reliance it currently has on the vSAN virtual storage solution and NSX network virtualization offerings.  If it doesn’t continue investing in these areas and other application ecosystem platforms, VMware risks falling further behind the public cloud players.

For a look at VMware’s strategic directions in the cloud application ecosystem, check out this recent discussion that CMO Ray O’Farrell had with SiliconANGLE Media’s John Furrier on theCUBE at a recent event:

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