It’s not a secret that there are several changes in enterprise, not only in the infrastructure part, but also on how applications are developed and operated (for example with DevOps), how they’re architected (for example with micro-services apps), and how they’re deployed (for example with Docker and containers).
The agility of (public) cloud and the possibility that offer brings new type of applications called “cloud-native” as they’re may or must re-designed for the mobile-cloud era. Those new type of application can completly change the future of enterprise IT and more faster that previous innovations.
This new (cloud) infrastructure could be (really) different from traditional infrastructure… for sure are different the model for the application as well described by Massimo Re Ferré in one post: Cloud Native Applications (for Dummies)
The actual big trend is in containers because are really more simple than “AWS” applications, but with similar flexibility. Complared to “legacy” application (current model) those could be more agile and scalable.
In the past 15 years, VMware has bring a great infrastruction evolution and with vSphere and vCloud it’s really possible have a flexible datacenter. But (traditional) applications scale still in the same way as in a physical world… only availability, managibility and flexibility have been improved.
But VMware is working also on new applications and related aspects with a dedicated team, and also a related blog. Actually there are only few posts (a good one from start is Introducing Cloud-Native Apps), but exect to see more soon.
Because finally more details as been reveiled on two important projects:
- Project Lightwave
- Project Photon
The first one is Cloud-native Identity & Access Management solution, based on an OpenSource based Identity, authentication & authorization server with the following features:
- Support for several standards: LDAP, Kerberos, SAML, OAuth2.0, x.509
- High scalable architecture with a multi-master state-based replication and multi-data center replication
- Multi-tenant with multiple independent forests
The second project is a container Runtime for vSphere based on an optimized Linux OS with Docker, rkt and Garden (Pivotal) support. Similar to other solution will be a minimum runtime to get containers running, but will be integrate with vSphere as part of your vSphere install and with the same support from VMware as vSphere product. Also this one will be an Open Source and will be available as preview 4/20 via JFrog Bintray, Github.
Of course this will not exclude the Software Defined Datacenter vision but you can see those projects as a specific solution for the new application build for the cloud… but legacy application are still there and will be there for a while… for those VM and IaaS solutions will remain the natural answer.