As part of VMBlog's prediction series, we decided to take the time while we were at
VMworld in Las Vegas to talk to some of the thought leaders and ask them where they thought
the future of virtualization and cloud is going.
And this is what they told us.
Oh, that's a great question.
So, look, when we founded the company, our belief was it's going to be a multi-cloud
and a hybrid cloud world.
And what you're seeing in this VMworld and over the last few months is becoming more
and more real where people are beginning to realize that the workloads are going to be
running either in the customer-owned data centers or in public clouds such as AWS.
VMC makes it relatively easier to not take advantage of public clouds.
So, our belief is as the time progresses, the workloads are going to be running in some
location and you're not going to worry about where the workload is running because you
have the workload puttability between one location and the other location.
Well, certainly customers are exploring the cloud as an economical or a simpler way to
manage some of their workloads.
They have concerns about the security of the data there, the sanctity of the data there.
In some cases, you've got compliance concerns about where data can reside.
For instance, if it's personally identifiable information in a healthcare context and you
have HIPAA rules about where it can reside, so you have to be careful with that.
We think this is a great opportunity for Pivot 3.
Over time, we already help orchestrate moving VMs back and forth from the cloud to on-prem
infrastructure.
But over time, our QoS and our orchestration capabilities will be applied to much broader
use cases around migrating workloads to and from the cloud, depending on what's most economical,
what's most compliant, what's most efficient use of resource, and how often does the data
get used.
Those sorts of dynamics will determine what's the best place to store data or to manage
your applications.
We will help orchestrate all of that.
I think virtualization is always a very interesting space.
I think we've seen some interesting announcements this week around some of the other card service
providers, so I think it'll continue to be very innovative, very disruptive, and allow
companies to do things that they couldn't do before and to do them at a much more cost-efficient
scale.
So we're certainly excited about that, we're excited to be here at the show, and we're
looking forward to next year and everything that's going to come up.
What clearly virtualization has got a strong hold in the compute and the storage area,
and you're now just starting to see it become reality in network, and really for many, many
years the network has been behind.
So it's really a key direction that things are going, and bringing cloud-like functionality
into the network to get the elasticity, to get the scale as a service model is key.
So bringing both the virtualization and cloud functions to the underlying network is a major
strategic direction.
This is going to be capped off with intent-based networking, and that's the ability for the
network to understand how all of these pieces work together, what the intended in-state
is supposed to be, and being able to make adjustments, and seeing how the network, how
the cloud, how the compute layer are operating, and make self-optimizing, self-correcting adjustments
to deliver the highest performance and the best in the sense of user experience and availability.
The future of malware is actually that it's nation-state capable.
Why?
Because nation-states aren't very good at looking after their malware, and we've seen
this already with Petya and so on, that nation-states are increasingly using these tools to attack
each other, and the cyber domain is a full frontal domain of conflict now, and it's pointed
not only at military organizations or governments, it's pointed at the commercial sector.
And so the bad guys increasingly well equipped with nation-state capabilities, and to be perfectly
honest, nation-state capabilities can't be detected before they do bad stuff.
The only right thing to do is to isolate them.
So effectively, every bromine micro-VM is running in the DMZ.
You just happen to think of it as a tab in your browser.
And so in a world where you cannot hope to detect the bad guy, because you don't know
what the bad guy is up to, the best thing to do is to completely isolate it, but give
the user an unchanged user experience.
Excellent question, because things are changing rapidly, right?
So we've seen this in the last few years, so one obvious thing happening is it's a bit
slower in the enterprise space, but we see it all over the place, so some of the workloads
are being migrated to a public cloud offering, whether it's Amazon, or Azure, or GCP.
So we have control of what we're doing there, we're actually providing the customer a single
pane of glass for both the traditional on-frame VM-ware environment and the new public cloud
offerings such as Amazon EC2 or Microsoft virtual machines.
And this is one thing which is happening rapidly.
Another thing we're seeing is the move from traditional VM-based workloads to container-like
applications.
And what we're planning with the control code map in the near future is to add support
for Docker-like containers as the new control of objects in the same real-time, real-life
visualization we have right now for VMs and processes, which will enable excellent, quick
analyze of which cross-analysis and visualization of the actual usage of containers on-raffin.
So these things are happening, it's happening fast, and we are obviously reacting and adding
features where it makes sense.
I believe that the feature of cloud and virtualization is already here, it's present.
A lot of our customers have gone through the transformation and what I've been noticing
as I've attended the sessions and got around the booths and talked to a lot of customers
in prospects has been that this is the kind of more reality.
In terms of future, I think it's more about gaining value from what the cloud has to offer.
So we've got elasticity, we've got all the cost reduction that the cloud has to offer,
and what we're seeing is trends around where it can apply those specific use cases in gaining
value from the cloud.
So for example, disaster recovery, how can I replacing some of the traditional, costly,
on-premises structures with the cloud, or being able to move workloads, expand and reduce
workloads to and from the cloud in a dynamic manner.
So both us and what I believe is the future of the industry will be around being able
to treat the hybrid infrastructure as a single entity that would cater to their workload.
