Tuesday, May 21, 2013 10:56 AMVMware vCloud Hybrid Service Strengthens Cloud Automation Ties Between VMware and Puppet EnterprisePuppet Labs
Just now, VMware announced vCloud Hybrid Service, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) enterprise public cloud. We're really excited that, right at launch, Puppet Enterprise is being used for the provisioning, configuration and management of application running on top of vCloud Hybrid Service.
Mathew Lodge, VMware's VP of Cloud Services, took some time out during launch-day preparations to check in with us at Puppet Labs. While weannounced the $30 million investment in January, our vCloud Hybrid Service relationship is a new one between the companies. We're still learning a lot about each other, and we wanted to know more about VMware's perception of the cloud and where Puppet Enterprise fits in.
He told us that a common theme in customer conversations and surveys was the demand for a VMware-built cloud service that could "function as an extension of existing data centers."
Perhaps more telling in the market outside VMware's customer base, he said, was "the limited adoption of public cloud services, usually in a couple of applications; but there wasn't broad adoption in enterprises."
According to Lodge, mobile applications and websites are driving a lot of demand:
"Customers are reacting to the rapid growth in mobile devices, but what's challenging for them is they have to integrate these with their existing systems. They want to build cloud-native applications, but at the same time, those are usually adjuncts or customizations on ERP or CRM platforms. They need the ability to blend what they already have with new cloud applications."
Offering a PaaS Roadmap
Moreover, they need a path that doesn't require them to go all-in on the cloud today:
"They see platform-as-a-service [PaaS] as something they want to do in the future. Getting to PaaS is much easier with a brand new application. The challenge to them is how to get there from where they are today."
So organizations are looking for incremental steps, because they also have to blend native PaaS applications with existing VM-based applications.
vCloud Hybrid Service is also arriving in a market where the primary focus of IT staff is very much in transition. In a lot of medium-sized organizations, Lodge said, infrastructure is necessary but not a differentiator on its own, "so they're very interested in ways to run their existing applications and have somebody else take care of the infrastructure piece."
In exchange, he said, "that frees up IT staff to focus on bringing more value to their businesses, usually leveraging the data and applications they already have."
With its strength in automation, that's where Puppet Enterprise begins to come into the vCloud Hybrid Service picture:
"Moving toward much greater automation and the use of APIs is part of the value of going to cloud. These applications can be managed much more effectively programmatically. It's important to us to support platforms like Puppet Enterprise with vCloud Hybrid Service, because our customers are looking to gain those operational benefits that are possible with cloud infrastructure."
DevOps and the Shadow IT Challenge
Organizations that have decided to embrace DevOps culture have their own challenges to deal with, trying to bridge the gap between IT operations and application development teams. Part of that gap comes from long-standing differences in how each set of concerns is managed and evaluated.
"IT is typically managed on things like cost and uptime," said Lodge, "application teams are typically managed on speed or agility. With vCloud Hybrid Service, what we're trying to do is deliver a service that enables the business to get the speed and agility it's looking for, but at the same time satisfy the needs of IT around management, visibility, performance and reliability."
And IT operations are also facing a challenge from "shadow IT," which confers a lot of the benefits of the cloud to development teams, but leaves ops teams on the outside looking in:
"IT organizations are hungry to satisfy the requirements of their constituencies, but they've been challenged. Typically, they're completely overloaded with what they have. If they're finding shadow IT, it's not because developers want to manage infrastructure, it's because they're looking for more flexibility."
vCloud Hybrid Service, said Lodge, looks to serve both of those constituencies and facilitate the silo-busting benefits of DevOps culture. Puppet Enterprise provides a natural fit there, making it much simpler to automate the provisioning and configuration of vCloud Hybrid Service-hosted applications and infrastructure from a single console over thousands of nodes.
The Value for Puppet Enterprise Customers
That single console is already valued by a lot of existing Puppet Enterprise users today, so we were curious about what's in vCloud Hybrid Service for them.
"The great advantage to them," said Lodge, "is that they get a single management platform both on premises and in the cloud."
The cloud is just one part of most organizations' infrastructures, and in many cases it will never completely represent the balance of IT concerns. Moreover, "It represents a totally different way of managing things. Solving that management challenge means customers can take advantage of cloud more completely, more broadly across the organization."
"We see some organizations that ultimately want to get out of the business of owning infrastructure," he said, noting that those organizations will use the hybrid cloud as part of a broader migration strategy.
On the other hand, some organizations will be living both on-premises and in the cloud for a long time to come, leveraging cloud infrastructure for more dynamic and customer-facing applications.
With vCloud Hybrid Service and Puppet Enterprise, he said, "you can essentially rent a software-defined data center from VMware as a public cloud service," yet still have the same familiar management interface you've used for on-premises or cloud deployments.
Learn More
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