First a little history lesson, did you know that VMware’s first product released to market was workstation? Any guess who the first real users were to adopt this?
I ask these questions to help illustrate why I believe we are going back to our roots a bit with the announcements today. Thanks to Pat, Kit and the Cloud Native Apps team we are finally going back and trying to regain our rightful place among the developers. The first step into VMware for most organizations was their developer community, they were finally able to test or run development environments on their local systems without rebooting thanks to workstation. Next the infrastructure teams saw the value by being able to provision multiple workloads on a single physical server using ESX, but who were the first customers of that virtual workload? You guessed it the developers with test and dev environment.
I can say definitively that my experience was my developer customers were actually happy with virtual workloads much more than the average application team with out of the box software. I have many stories where we actually had to hide the fact that an app team was getting a virtual machine. This is indicative of just how the developers are and have been shaping the world of infrastructure for many years…. Now consider how that looks today, workloads in Amazon, Azure, Rackspace, and other PaaS like solutions. Most infrastructure teams are either struggling to keep up or providing services that don’t meet the real developer need. So what if VMware a company that has the foundation in both infrastructure and developer can help bridge the gap and offer next generation application services that can easily be utilized, managed, and run anywhere?
I believe we started this journey last year with the introduction of CodeStream! vRCS (as you will see it referred to) is a full pipeline management solution that can assist the developers model every step from dev through each stage into production. The visibility of success or failures as well as gating rules that can be configured to either automatically promote or have approval policies applied before the promotion of code. This is one of the key tenants to a successful DevOps strategy and is something that we can deliver today that will assist in the standard Platform 2 applications as well as the next gen Platform 3 applications.
We also were looking to address the developer needs with VIO and offering a very quick ability to stand up and give developers their own OpenStack APIs on top of your existing vSphere architecture. The time investment for this is in the hours rather than days, weeks, or months for most open stack implementations.
If you take both of these into account from late 2014 we laid the ground work for what was introduced today. Pat and Kit have taken our developer story and enhanced it even further by first diving head first into the open source community and committing some great projects for people to take advantage of. We know without a doubt that our tooling for our developer customers must be flexible and open. You will continue to see a strong dedication from VMware to be one of the top contributors to open source! In doing so today we introduced two core projects, Photon, and Lightwave.
A very light weight and flexible linux distribution that installs and boots in a few moments on any platform. This can be a standard platform for all of your needs both internal and on public or hybrid clouds. Additionally it is ready to be built out into a full blown linux distribution for all of your legacy applications. Supports multiple different container engines including docker, rkt, and garden. Support for multiple platforms, GCE, AWS, Azure, vSphere, Fusion/Workstation. Available today!!!
LIGHTWAVE
A powerful tool for centralizing identity and access management based on open standards. Full Multi-tenancy and Multi-Master environment that give you all of the tooling needed to bring authentication, authorization, and single sign-on based on name/password, tokens, or certificates. Will be available in the next few weeks, stay tuned!
This is only the beginning as you will see over the next several months, but imagine a day when you could take two services like Photon and Lightwave and providing a single platform for deployment and security to both infrastructure services as well as application services. Operationally ideal while meeting or exceeding the needs of the corporate developer community.
If you missed the announcement please feel free to review the recording here. http://vmw.re/1Jnb5jn
