VMware Inc. is quickly gaining ground in the public cloud market. It entered the space around 2014 when it provided a hybrid cloud solution known as the vCloud Air, which connected on-premises vSphere environments to cloud-based infrastructure as a service.

Recently, VMware partnered with public cloud providers to leverage their infrastructure and enhance its current hybrid solution. The result is a solution aimed at microservices, containers and Kubernetes that allows running and managing containerized applications based on Kubernetes within hybrid and multicloud environments.

“I’m really excited about VMware Cloud with Tanzu services,” said Kit Colbert (pictured), chief technology officer of VMware. “So, we have VMware Cloud, which takes our VMware Cloud Foundation technology and delivers that as-a-service, in partnership with our public cloud providers, but in particular with AWS, VMC on AWS. We’re combining that with our Tanzu portfolio. These are technologies focused on folks driving DevOps, building and operating modern applications. And what we’re doing is bringing them together to simplify customers moving from their data centers into the cloud and then modernizing their applications.”

Colbert spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during last month’s theCUBE on VMworld event. They discussed VMware Tanzu services, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Disaster Recovery and Project Arctic. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Talk to me about some of the catalysts for this change and this offering of services.

Colbert: We saw a tremendous amount of people needing to support remote workers overnight, and cloud is a perfect use case for that. But the challenge a lot of customers had was that they couldn’t take the time to retool; they had to use what they already had. And so, something like VMware Cloud was perfect for that because it allowed them to take what they were doing on-prem and seamlessly extend it into the cloud without any changes. 

At the same time, what we also saw was the acceleration of the digital transformation. People are now online; they’re needing to interact with an app over their phone to get something they want remotely delivered or scheduled. So, as customers move their application estate into the cloud with VMware Cloud and AWS, they then had this need to modernize those applications, to be able to deliver them faster, to respond fast to the very dynamic nature of what was happening during the pandemic.

So let’s talk about some of the opportunities and the advantages that VMware Cloud with Tanzu service is going to deliver to those IT admins.

Colbert: The folks who are familiar with VMware may remember that a couple of years ago we announced Project Pacific, which was a deep integration of Kubernetes into vSphere. And what that did was it enabled the IT admins to have direct insight inside of Kubernetes clusters. It also allowed them to leverage their existing vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation tooling on those workloads.

So fast forward today and we have this built-in now, and what we’re doing is actually offering that as-a-service so that the customer doesn’t need to deal with managing, installing, updating it. Instead, they can just leverage it and can start creating Kubernetes clusters and upstream conformant Kubernetes clusters.

How is this going to empower those IT admins to become Kubernetes operators?

Colbert: The real benefit of this approach and this deep integration is that it allows them to take those tools and operational best practices that they already have and now apply them to these new workloads fairly seamlessly. And so this is really about the power of leveraging all the investments they’ve made to take those forward with modern applications. 

We see that the vast majority, something like 75%, are using multiple clouds or on-prem and the cloud. So, what we’re looking at is how do we enable the right sorts of consistency, both from an infrastructure perspective enabling things like security, but also for management across all these environments. 

So VMware Cloud with Tanzu services, not only includes the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service, but it also includes Tanzu Mission Control essentials. And this is really the next generation of management when you start looking at modern applications. And what Tanzu Mission Control focuses on is managing Kubernetes consistently across clouds. 

Talk to me about how this fits into VMware’s bigger picture.

Colbert: So what we’re really doing with VMware Cloud is trying to provide a powerful infrastructure layer that is available anywhere customers want to run applications. And that could be in the public cloud, it could be in the data center, or it could be at the edge. So we’re going broad, and we’re also building up this notion of Tanzu services being seamlessly integrated, starting now with VMware Cloud AWS but [also] expanding that into every location that we have.

We’re also really excited about another announcement … called Project Arctic. The idea with Project Arctic is to start driving more choice and flexibility into how customers consume the VMware Cloud. Do they consume it as software or as-a-service, and where do they do that? Project Artic is focused on connecting into these … existing vSphere environments and delivering some of the VMware Cloud benefits there — things like being able to manage those environments through the VMware Cloud Services Console, being able to easily move applications between on-prem and the cloud.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE on VMworld event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for theCUBE on VMworld event. Neither VMware Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE