Cloud Native Without The Chaos

Cloud native doesn’t mean what it used to. What started as a self-service way to buy compute fast has turned into a full application platform transformation where Kubernetes, desired state, and automation decide how software scales, heals, and lands on compute, storage, and networking.

From Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we sit down with Dilpreet from Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) organization to talk about what’s actually changing on the ground. We get into why Kubernetes has moved from a niche tool to a mainstream standard, and why that success brings a new set of problems: operational complexity, painful upgrades, lifecycle management, and the skills required to keep clusters stable over time. If your cloud native journey feels slower than the slide decks promised, this is the part you’ve been running into.

We also unpack VCF’s product strategy for simplifying the cloud consumption experience by bringing key capabilities together, including automation and multi-tenant cloud operations. Dilpreet explains how combining ARIA Automation with vCloud Director can create a more unified interface for enterprises and cloud service providers, then tying that experience more deeply to the underlying Kubernetes and infrastructure fabric. The aim is a Kubernetes-like workflow where you declare what you want and the platform does the heavy lifting.

Finally, we talk about a big shift we’re hearing from customers: they want that cloud experience on-prem. We connect that to telco modernization as networks move from VNFs to CNFs and the push toward modern telco cloud platforms announced at MWC. If you care about cloud native, Kubernetes operations, VMware Cloud Foundation, platform engineering, and what AI-era apps will demand next, this one is for you.

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Transcript

MWC Meet-Up And Introductions

SPEAKER_01 0:01

And I'm here at Broadcom and Dilpreet at MWC in Barcelona. Dilpreet, how are you? Great. How are you? Great. Great to see you at the busy MWC, probably the busiest ever, given all the innovation happening. Before that, maybe introduce yourself and your team within Broadcom.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Yeah, great. I'm Dilpreet. I work on uh uh VCF, which is the main product out of our VMware division inside of Broadcom. And so we were acquired about a couple of years ago from Broadcom, and you know, we've consolidated all of our key software innovations into this one division, VCF. And I run the VCF workloads division uh part of the division, which uh drives all of the technology that drives our workloads, including our Kubernetes stack as well as the our consumption, our cloud consumption interface, and so on.

Cloud Native From Self-Service To Kubernetes

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Wow, that's quite a wheelhouse to be in. And of course, you're doubling down on an RD and investment in the VCF platform. It's amazing to watch. Talk about the cloud transformation as you're on the front lines of it the last number of years. Where are we in this move to truly cloud native?

SPEAKER_00 1:09

You know, it it's interesting. Like, you know, I think in the early days, the the cloud uh native just meant uh having a self-service interface that you could just take a credit card and then go buy some compute and then get going. Now I think the uh you have these fundamental technologies that are now maturing, like Kubernetes, that uh are at the heart of a overall application transformation that uh you know drives uh the heart, uh the platform of the application. So how the application grows or shrinks, how the application determines what uh like runtime it's gonna have and uh how it's gonna be placed on the on on its uh on compute, uh how it's gonna be utilizing storage and other capabilities. Uh and so it's foundational in the way that the applications change so that they they they the application just has to worry about the business logic and not necessarily how it lays out across the the compute, storage, or networking. Right? And so that this this particular transformation has been interesting to me. I've been on it for a little bit uh at uh VMware and focusing on how we can leverage this uh capability to be able to deliver more value to the applications. Uh and so that that part of the overall uh cloud native story is is really interesting. Now we're in the AI generation, and so now you have another part of the application stack that's coming in that is critical to the next wave of transfer transformation for applications, and how that becomes a fundamental building block for the future changes that's gonna happen in applications moving forward.

The Real Pain Of Kubernetes Operations

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Exciting times. Love your enthusiasm for this space. And of course, outcomes vary broadly from those who have the strategy right, but maybe not quite delivering on the expectation. Where are those gaps?

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the uh if you look at like this maturing of the Kubernetes space, which has happened quite recently actually, uh, and we're seeing a lot more transition for customers that are now picking up Kubernetes and going forward with it, where you know in the past it wasn't it was more of a niche play. What we're seeing is that more and more customers are hitting the challenges of Kubernetes. It is very, very complex to uh operate, uh, to upgrade, to deal with the various lifecycle pieces. It can it can be time consuming. You need a certain set of skill sets and so on. And so one of our focus areas has been how do we make that much, much, much simpler.

VCF Strategy For One Cloud Interface

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Uh fantastic. Well, simple is good, simple saves money and all sorts of upside. Um, talk about your product strategy and and how it's evolved to support you know cloud native transformations. You've invested obviously tremendously in DRD, but tell us about the strategic direction.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

You know, it it one of the main things that we did when we brought VCF together is that we took all the value that was across different divisions inside of VMware and we said, okay, how do we integrate it deeply into one product? And and, you know, so like we said, uh one of the key areas that I worked on was uh this um automation plus uh vCloud Director. Uh how do we bring our uh our ARIA automation and vCloud Director together into a common cloud interface, if you will. And so one of the things that we we really focused on is what are the values here? So Cloud Director had this amazing way to do uh multi-tenancy, which is critical for any kind of cloud uh customer, especially our CSPs that are doing uh that are servicing up uh for various vendor uh customers uh different cloud uh experience that they want to be able to deliver. And so you want to be able to have that multi-tenancy, and then automation did a great job of uh then bringing in all the various automation pieces that usually enterprises require, like how do you connect to various systems in other parts of the uh of the enterprise and make sure those systems are working well with your your your cloud system. And so like we took both of the best of both worlds and brought them together and created one big cloud uh consumption experience. Um, but then we took uh another aspect that we had, which was the compute Kubernetes experience and tied it deeply with it. So now you have this underlying IaaS fabric that is tied deeply to the consumption experience, and and so you have individual objects that are coming from the platform rather than abstractions up at the top. And so uh what what you get at the end is a really killer experience for any user that is uh now using any VMs, Kubernetes clusters, or any other objects that we provide. And so they just have a Kubernetes-like interface up at the top that is based on desired state outcomes that then delivers that value down into the system for them.

On-Prem Cloud Native And Telco Shift

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Well, it's really compelling. What a great time to be at Broadcom. Uh maybe a bonus question here. Yeah. What's the most exciting, fun, interesting part of your job, not just of course being at Broadcom, but within the VCF division?

Closing Thoughts From Barcelona

SPEAKER_00 6:25

I you know, I I think we are, you know, we are seeing a lot of energy by customers where they're they went through the wave of cloud native and they went to cloud to be able to get to cloud native. And now they're like, hey, I really want that experience on-prem. And so I'm really jazzed about like bringing that experience on premise. And so all of this value that we've been generating is to be able to deliver that value on-prem. And so, along with this, uh, you know, we're we're here because we work uh with telcos and doing a lot of great things with telcos, and so part of that application journey is also what the telcos are going through as well in moving from VNFs to CNFs and so on. And we want to be able to bring that modern experience to the the telcos with our new uh telco cloud platform nine uh that we just announced at at uh at this conference.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

Well, great time to be at Broadcom, great time to be in Barcelona. What a what a time to be in the industry. Thanks so much for joining. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Thank you.