What's Up with Tech?

Private Cloud's New Momentum

• Evan Kirstel

Share episode

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com

Private cloud is experiencing a dramatic resurgence as organizations rethink their cloud strategies. Prashanth Shenoy reveals fascinating insights from their research spanning 1,800 global IT decision-makers: 53% are building new workloads on private cloud while a striking 70% are repatriating workloads from public environments.

What's driving this shift? Security concerns top the list, particularly for regulated industries handling sensitive data that can't be exposed in public environments. Cost predictability follows closely behind, as organizations struggle with unexpected public cloud expenses and seek more transparent alternatives. The generative AI revolution adds another dimension, with companies needing controlled environments to develop AI applications using proprietary data.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) sits at the center of this transformation. With over a million engineering hours invested, VCF 9.0 introduces capabilities that bridge infrastructure requirements with developer needs. The platform now includes native S3 object storage alongside traditional storage options and features expanded partnership with Canonical to bring Ubuntu OS - the leading AI and cloud operating system - directly into the platform.

Developer experience remains paramount, with VMware working to eliminate the 20% of time developers typically spend navigating IT requirements. Through partnerships with NVIDIA and AMD for cutting-edge GPU support and large-scale deployments at organizations like Walmart, VMware demonstrates its commitment to powering the next generation of enterprise applications. Looking forward, cyber resilience and compliance capabilities will become increasingly central as organizations navigate complex security requirements in AI-driven environments.

Want to experience the VMware community firsthand? Take a certification exam at VMware Explore and score yourself a pair of exclusive VMware sneakers!

Support the show

More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

Speaker 1:

Hey, everybody really excited to sit down with Prashanth at VMware Explorer Blockbuster day of news announcements and more Prashanth how are you, hey, doing?

Speaker 2:

good Been a busy couple of days.

Speaker 1:

It has indeed, and you are on fire. Maybe, before that, start with introductions to yourself, your role and team within.

Speaker 2:

Broadcom. Yeah, so I'm part of the VMware Cloud Foundation division, or VCF division, as we call it, in Broadcom. Yeah, so I'm part of the VMware Cloud Foundation Division, or VCF Division, as we call it in Broadcom, and I run the product marketing and learning certification side of the world. So yeah, it's been exciting.

Speaker 1:

So much news, so many milestones today. What's top of mind as we sit here on day one?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, top of mind for us. You can see the show is all about like, hey, helping our customers build, operate, deploy a private cloud right. So we've invested heavily from an R&D perspective. We saw like over a million hours of engineering spent on building that and we've seen tremendous growth, especially since we launched the VCF 9.0 release, which is a big release for us towards this private cloud vision. So we're seeing a lot of good traction. That's one, but our customers expect more. They're always so what's next, right?

Speaker 2:

So we unveiled a whole slew of innovation, primarily to help create a lot more developer autonomy so they can build their modern applications on VCF and have all the services at their fingertips to do that, packaged right into VCF. What can we do to also provide private AI as a service? And then cyber resilience and compliance is a huge area of focus for us, and especially in highly regulated industry. We are seeing a lot of traction there with cyber threats, ransomware and how do you stay compliant continuously and how do you recover rapidly. So we did a cyber compliance advanced service announcement also right. So, yes, it's been pretty busy, but we're getting a lot of good feedback from our customers saying that we are in the right direction. I think now it's working with them to get them to where they want to be and have a clear adoption plan so they can leverage all of the capabilities that we built in as part of ECF.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic and there's a lot of buzz here to explore around the cloud reset, maybe, define that, perhaps, but also, why is private cloud gaining so much momentum now?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's interesting because we did this commissioned report, but a blind survey across 1,800 of our IT decision makers across the globe, right, americas, emea and APJ to understand hey, how are their cloud projects going on right now? What are their big initiatives, especially in this world of Gen AI? What are they doing, what are some of the challenges and priorities and, in general, where they are in the maturity scale? Right, and we got some really interesting findings and the three big highlights of that was number one the cloud reset right. So private cloud is I wouldn't call it making a comeback, but it's gaining a lot more momentum than what we've seen in the last two years, where close to 53% of the customers that not customers, just organizations that we surveyed say that they're building net new workloads on private cloud right, and close to 70%, which is pretty much two out of three customers have repatriated workloads or are actively planning to repatriate workloads from public cloud right. So it shows that they are now using private cloud more as their strategic initiative to run both their modern applications, including Gen AI, and their business-critical applications that are VM-based on that right. So that's the first step. So we are seeing growth and it was good to see why that is happening.

Speaker 2:

Number two the tailwinds of this private cloud are around security, around Gen AI and around cost predictability, if you will right. And security and Gen AI are kind of tied together because there's a lot of concerns around data privacy, data access, data sovereignty when it comes to Gen AI who gets access to what? Especially again in regulated industries like healthcare and FSI that has a lot of customer proprietary data right so which they don't want to send off to a public cloud. So that concerns and security and resiliency concerns is making them take a fresh look at private cloud where they can run like fine-tuning and inferencing, where they can use their own data and run AI applications on top right. So that's where you're seeing a lot more traction.

Speaker 2:

And then the cost predictability the transparency in the public cloud world has become a bit challenging and they've drawn really large commits with some of the hyperscalers and now they're seeing cost being a huge challenge. So they're coming back to see hey, can a private cloud provide a bit more predictability, both from a CapEx perspective and the ongoing consumption perspective, so IT can do a showback or a chargeback and get really granular information around where is the cost spend happening and how do I gain cost efficiency and cost optimization? So that's the second part, but the third part is more. We have seen customers who have what we call a cloud maturity advantage where they've already had a platform approach to IT, not a product and component approach to IT have seen a lot more productivity gains and ROI a lot faster than customers who are not fully leaned in into this platform way of operating their IT right. So those were some of the interesting findings that we got from the private cloud outlook, where our hypothesis around where the market is going with the cloud reset was good.

Speaker 1:

Extraordinary. You're also making a big case for developer-first innovation. Yeah, how do you communicate that shift not just to your traditional technical audience, which appreciate it immensely, but also the business?

Speaker 2:

audiences. Yeah, absolutely See. At the end of the day, infrastructure is a means to an end, the end being for helping developers run their applications the way they want. Right? And developers don't want to deal with infrastructure. They want infrastructure and IT generally to get out of the way so they can ask for services. They get it, it's a frictionless experience and they are off to building the next modern application, right so that's kind of the developer mentality, right? And they want tools that they are using. It's part of their CICD pipeline and it's a faster path to production for their application, right? So that is around the developer autonomy that they're looking for. It on the other side want to provide all these services in a frictionless manner, but they also want to have some controls and guardrails, right so, to make sure compliance, governance, access control, resiliency requirements that are all met right.

Speaker 2:

So this combination of developer autonomy with IT control coming together is what we are focused on delivering as part of VCF, right? So? And we've found that almost 20% of a developer's time is spent working with IT to get what they want, right. So how can we take that time out of the picture, create a set of developer services that are turnkey and out of the box so that they don't need to file an IT ticket. If they want to build, like hey, I want a data service. Like hey, they can just go request within VCF and underlying IT provides that data services and they provide all of the cost, controls and governance and resolve the compute resource, the storage resource, everything required for creating their data engine right. So that kind of frictionless service is what we are focused on building. Quite a few are already there as part of VCF 9, but a few key things that we announced. One was around the support for native S3 object storage now as part of VCF, right.

Speaker 2:

So we've had file, we've had block and we worked with third-party object store. Now we'll have native S SD object store built in. So any kind of storage workloads, file, block and object you can now use VCF. You get the same unified operations across all of these workloads. And SD objects are pretty heavily used in this, modern databases et cetera. So now developers get easy access to these object servers. So that's one and two.

Speaker 2:

We have extended our strategic partnership with Canonical right, who pretty much have the Ubuntu OS, which is the number one AI OS, if you will, and the cloud OS, right, it's used across the world, pretty well known. Now we are working with them to bring that natively as part of VCF, where we will provide enterprise support for all of the Ubuntu OS. We do chiseled containers that Ubuntu OS builds as part of this too, so you can ship applications faster and lighter because they take out all of the unwanted libraries and dependencies and have containers which are very optimal and lightweight, if you will. So it shrinks the attack surface but also helps build lightweight applications really fast, right? So those are some of the things that we are helping to make developer life a lot more frictionless, but provide a set of key infrastructure services so they can provision the infrastructure, and then developer services so they can consume the infrastructure in a very elegant manner.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. Yeah, those ecosystem partnerships seem pretty central to your strategy. Not just Canonical, but NVIDIA, AMD and others. It seems like it's all about AI and cloud performance at the end of the day.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. We've had longstanding relationship with both NVIDIA and AMD. The Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. That we did was pretty much a turnkey solution to run modern AI workloads on NVIDIA GPUs with our VCF stack. So now we've extended the support for their latest generation, next generation BlackVille GPUs as well as their Pro 6000 Server Edition, also right, the RTX version and then support for their ConnectX 7 and Bluefield 3 GPUs too. So continuous ongoing work to make sure our customers have the flexibility and the same with AMD with their MI350 Instant GPU series. So our customers, just like VMware has always been known for, provide the flexibility and choice in the underlying infrastructure that we can support and also have an open ecosystem on top so we can bring in third-party services, integrate it or have built-in services as part of VCF. So a huge part that our ecosystem partners play to make sure our customers can run their modern applications on us.

Speaker 1:

Brilliant and you've always been great at communicating complex capabilities and functionality to an engineering and IT audience, but you're communicating with C-suites these days more and more with Walmart yeah, amazing win. Maybe talk about that and what it means to engage. You know fortune-level companies across the board.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we have some really. I mean, vmware has always been pretty much in every Fortune 500, fortune 1000 customers, right, they trust VMware to run their most business critical applications on VMware. So that continues to be the case. But we are seeing some large scale deployments right now. Walmart selected us as their private cloud virtualization vendor for their distributed stores and really unifying their distributed operations. So run on VCF. We have some of the world's largest banks running like 5 million cores of VCF. Right, these are huge, large scale things. They want a high degree of availability, high degree of resiliency, but all of the developer services for building their next-gen AI applications, especially in the FSI space and in the healthcare and life science space where they're investing heavily. So it's been good to see the customer feedback in terms of what's working and what's not and where we can improve, and this has been really good for us to learn from them as we start putting more and more enhancements as part of our upcoming release with VCF9.

Speaker 1:

Phenomenal. How do you see VCF's role evolving over the next couple of years as enterprises double down on modernization and really adopt these AI apps which we've discovered haven't been doing at scale yet? And you know, multi-cloud enters the picture.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I would say three things right. One we want every customer who's on a cloud journey to really have a platform approach of building, deploying, operating and consuming a private cloud right. Just like hyperscalers have done this for 15 years, we want our customers to be their own cloud provider and we want to make sure VCF is that modern private cloud that they can use to build and operate. So that's number one and we are working towards that and we feel very confident where we are today from a momentum perspective. Number two VCF is going to be the platform for running your container workloads right. You've always run your VM workloads, but we have all the built-in container services, from runtime to cluster management to all of the IaaS services that Kubernetes workloads require. So we will see tremendous.

Speaker 2:

We are already seeing a lot of growth, but we expect in the next two years a lot of modern applications and container workloads being run on VCF. And number three I think there's going to be a lot of focus on cyber resilience and cyber compliance, especially in the AI world. So how do we help our customers continuously be compliant? What can we do to provide faster security and incident response? What can we do to help with cyber recovery and threat detection and threat prevention Working not only with VCF but the application advanced networking security capabilities that we have with our ANS division is going to be very, very key for us. So looking forward to the momentum over the next few years.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's going to be exciting to watch and congratulations on all the success so far, onwards and upwards. Yeah, absolutely, and congratulations on the shoes. Is there a skew yet for the new VMware shoes Shoes.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, actually, any attendee who takes the certification exam and everybody with the full Explore Pass gets a free exam voucher. So if you take it, they pass it. You get to wear these cool kicks.

Speaker 1:

Is there a cheat code for people like myself.

Speaker 2:

Oh, we'll hook you up.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Okay take care, thank you.