Internet service provider CenturyLink Inc. has been up to some new developments in digitization initiatives, including bringing computing workloads closer to users. And as more companies look to hybrid cloud architectures, grappling with the connectivity issues that come along with scaling data across public and private clouds, CenturyLink is managing more solutions through important infrastructure integrations, such as VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services.

They’re migrating workloads, reducing headaches, and providing tools that boost performance for customers’ unique computing environments, according to Chris McReynolds (pictured), vice president of cloud and data services product management at CenturyLink Inc.

“We’ve developed a lot of capabilities over the last year and a half around dynamic networkingm” he said. “If you have your existing VMware environment in your own data center, or maybe it’s a private cloud that’s managed by CenturyLink, we now have the ability for customers to go in and create private network connections that have better latency, have better throughput and performance between those environments and VMware Cloud on AWS.”

McReynolds spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and John Troyer (@jtroyer), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld 2019 event in San Francisco. They discussed why milliseconds matter, CenturyLink’s newest capabilities, and what it really means to compute on the edge (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Walls: Let’s paint the picture of CenturyLink. What your portfolio includes there, what you’re up to, and maybe starting to hint a little bit about why milliseconds matter to you?

McReynolds: We’re a technology company, global in nature. A lot of our roots started with fiber connectivity, basic networking services, IP services, but over the years we’ve become far more of an IT service company. There was an acquisition of Savvis a long time ago that brought a lot of those capabilities to our company, and we’ve made more fold-in acquisitions that have also bolstered those capabilities. 

We have invested heavily in security services recently, and about two weeks ago we had an announcement that said we’re investing heavily in edge compute, getting workloads closer to end users, and that’s really where milliseconds matter. You want the performance of those applications to consumers or machinery, or whatever it may be, to work effectively and work well, and sometimes that requires that those workloads are in close proximity to the end users.

Walls: How do you define the edge [of the computing network]? Because there are lot of different slices of that, right? Different interpretations, different definitions. How do you define separate edge from core, and what’s true edge?

McReynolds: The broadest definition I’ve seen is that you have core, and you can think AWS, Azure; you can think where the big core cloud nodes are that are pretty central, maybe 50 milliseconds away from the end users. There are two intermediate “edges,” and this is where there are varying opinions. To me, there’s really only one. If you’re within five milliseconds of where your end users are, I consider that to be a market edge.

Some people say there’s a closer edge that’s within a millisecond of the end users, but I personally have not seen the use cases come out yet that require that low of a latency that don’t actually reside where the end users are.

Troyer: One of the latest announcements from CenturyLink is that you’re providing VMware Cloud on AWS. You’re able to provide that as a managed service. You already do managed services where you’re managing things in your data centers, but you can also manage workloads on-prem. Talk a little bit about that portfolio and how adding VMware Cloud on AWS adds to that.

McReynolds: We have a tool called Cloud Application Manager that has been built over the past handful of years that allows customers to deploy workloads to AWS, to Azure, and now to VMC on AWS, as well as private cloud environments. So maybe customers want to host those workloads on-premise, maybe it’s regulatory compliance, or whatever the reason may be. We have a lot of experience helping customers deploy those workloads, and then a lot of customers come to us and want us to manage the lifecycle of those workloads. Those are the core capabilities. 

I think the reason that VMC on AWS is so compelling to customers is a lot of customers may not want to deal with the hardware refresh cycles that they do when it’s their own private cloud environment or their own hardware stack. This gives them the opportunity to migrate those workloads in a relatively seamless fashion into an environment that is sitting in more of a public cloud-type model, where it’s opex versus the capex and the headache.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: CenturyLink Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CenturyLink Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE