VMware Inc.’s major announcement in March that it would become an enabler of cloud migration and multicloud management is actually a story about Goldilocks and the three bears.

The lead analogy in this saga was provided by Craig McLuckie, co-founder of Kubernetes and vice president of research and development for VMware, when he declared last month that Kubernetes had become the enterprise’s “Goldilocks abstraction.”

What exactly is that?

McLuckie was referring to a principle in object-oriented programming that details the ideal level of abstraction for applications. When not at the right abstraction level, applications can be difficult to comprehend and ever harder to maintain. In other words, it’s a level, as in Goldilocks’ personal experience, that’s just right.

The three bears are the top public cloud providers — Amazon Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC — into whose houses VMware has now paid a visit. With the release of vSphere 7 and its ability through the Tanzu portfolio to build applications that can run across clouds using Kubernetes, VMware is delivering a message that customers need not worry whether the cloud porridge is too hot or the containerized chair is too big, VMware will make it all just right.

“If I’ve got Kubernetes from Azure, Kubernetes from Amazon, Kubernetes from other environments, Tanzu can manage across all of those,” said Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during a Breaking Analysis video interview with Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante. “Kubernetes really won the container orchestration wars, and this is a way that VMware can now enable customers to move down that path to modernize their environments.”

Acquisitions paved the way

VMware’s decision to make the most significant update to its vSphere virtualization manager in more than a decade should have come as no surprise. The clues to where it was headed could be found in VMware’s acquisitions over the past 18 months and an announcement made at its annual conference in August.

The acquisition of Pivotal Software Inc. for $2.7 billion in 2018 gave VMware its push down the road toward becoming a cloud-native vendor to manage infrastructure in any environment. This was followed by the purchase of Heptio Inc. for $550 million three months later, which brought McLuckie and his Kubernetes co-founder Joe Beda into the fold.

VMware snapped up Bitnami Inc., another Kubernetes-focused startup, last May and Bitfusion Inc., maker of virtualization software for accelerated computing, in July for undisclosed amounts. Add in the purchase of security-focused firms Carbon Black Inc. and Intrinsic Inc. last year, and the pieces of this month’s announcement are all there.

The rollout of Project Pacific at the company’s major annual conference in August set the stage for VMware’s evolution of vSphere to become a native Kubernetes platform. It signaled VMware’s desire to become a major player in modernized applications while serving the needs of both enterprise information-technology operations teams and developers.

“If I’m building modern applications, well, I’m probably not starting with virtual machines,” Miniman noted. “Containers are the way that most people are doing that.”

Here’s Miniman’s and Vellante’s complete analysis:

Visibility for containers and multicloud

One of the most significant elements of VMware’s latest vSphere release was how it positioned Project Pacific as a critical bridge between VM-based legacy workloads and containerized applications. By embedding Kubernetes natively into vSphere 7, Kubernetes now becomes the control plane, providing IT operators and developers with a single platform to manage workloads and apps.

This has been a pain point for major enterprises, such as VMware customer British Telecom, which yearned for a way to manage VM-generated workloads and containers together in a multicloud environment.

“We were struggling with the inability to have a single pane of glass for all of that,” said Philip Buckley-Mellor, infrastructure designer at British Telecom, who discussed VMware latest vSphere release during an interview with theCUBE. “We want to allow our operations teams to be able to differentiate between what’s a VM and what’s a container; that’s really the Holy Grail. We can take the onus of performance management and capacity management away from the developers who don’t really care about that a lot of the time.”

Aiming for the edge

VMware may be playing the long game here by positioning itself for a significant role in edge computing, especially in the deployment of the new 5G wireless standard by telecommunications companies.

There are signs that VMware is looking to expand its telco footprint from being a strategic internal IT vendor to one that caters to the broad scope of enterprise telco business. Last year, the company acquired Uhana Inc., which provides optimization products for 5G-based radio access networks and added it to VMware’s edge portfolio. This was preceded by VMware’s purchase of VeloCloud, an SD-WAN provider that brings workloads out to the distributed edge.

In brief comments on the subject of edge during their interviews with theCUBE, VMware executives offered a glimpse into how vSphere 7 will complement the company’s telco strategy.

“Many of those applications that are deployed at telco edge are container applications,” said Paul Turner, vice president of product management for vSphere at VMware. “We have a platform with vSphere 7 that can give the telco edge and 5G network deployments a much more secure, predictable runtime environment.”

Competition with Red Hat

With the latest announcements, the stakes have been raised significantly among major cloud players in how to respond to VMware’s Kubernetes-focused strategy. Microsoft already has Azure Arc and Kubernetes Service to make it simple to deploy a managed container cluster on its cloud platform, and Google’s multicloud application Anthos platform was built on the Kubernetes engine.

Although it’s certainly conceivable that Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft or Google may respond with new Kubernetes-focused offerings later this year, VMware currently has only one major competitor in this space — IBM Corp.-owned Red Hat Inc.

VMware Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Poonen acknowledged this reality in a recent interview with The Times of India. “They were the only other company that was focused on containers on an enterprise scale,” Poonen said. “But now with the direction that we’re taking to put capabilities and containers into our core, we believe our product will safely put us ahead of Red Hat and others in terms of our full potential.”

Not long after his company acquired Heptio, VMware Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger described VMware as “the dial tone for Kubernetes management.” It was an interesting analogy at the time, given that his company was still assembling the pieces for what would indeed become an orchestration platform for the multicloud world. Other VMware executives have since taken the “dial tone” analogy to heart.

“You get the same cloud operating experience, and it’s all driven by Kubernetes-based dial tone that’s available within this platform,” Turner said during an interview with theCUBE. “We are bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so you can manage large-scale environments, both on-premises and public cloud. Just turn on the Kubernetes dial tone; it’s as simple as that.”

With the release of vSphere 7, VMware has managed to complete the call. Now it will see if the rest of the enterprise world gets on the line.

Here are the interviews with VMware executives and Buckley-Mellor:

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