VMware Drives Developer-Ready Updates Into Cloud Foundation

VMware dumped a ton of updates into its Cloud Foundation software stack including S3-compatible object storage support and enhanced scaling capabilities that company executives say will make the platform developer-ready to build cloud-native applications. VMware dumped a ton of updates into its Cloud Foundation software stack including S3-compatible object storage support and enhanced scaling capabilities that company executives say will make the platform developer-ready to build cloud-native applications. VMware Cloud Foundation is the company’s hybrid cloud platform for managing virtual machines (VMs) and containers. The integrated software stack bundles VMware’s vSphere virtualization software with vSAN for storage virtualization, NSX for network virtualization, and vRealize for cloud management. It can be deployed on-premises or  run as a service within a public cloud. Version 4.2 of VMware Cloud Foundation drives Kubernetes and cloud-native applications into the heart of platform through Cloudian HyperStore and MinIO Object Storage plug-ins via the vSAN Data Persistence platform. This marks an important milestone for the company’s enterprise customers looking to adopt Kubernetes-native object storage as part of their hybrid cloud strategies to enhance scalability and operations. In addition to storage improvements, VMware Cloud Foundation includes new networking, management, and security features for large-scale VM and container deployments. Specifically, the vendor announced three new product releases: vSAN HCI Mesh, NSX-T 3.1 Federation, and SDDC Manager Security Hardening. This round of updates was also accompanied by six new product updates to the vRealize cloud management platform. Object storage is gaining speed as the technology of choice for unstructured data because it prevents additional costs involved with data traffic, provides scalability, reduces file system limitations, maintains higher security, and supports metadata tagging.   vSAN Data Persistence, which launched last fall, enables IT teams to provision modern applications that require stateful services such as multi-tenant object storage in Kubernetes containers, NoSQL databases, and event streaming services for persistent data in just a few clicks directly from vCenter.  Today’s release provides VMware Cloud Foundation customers access to S3-compatible object storage via partner plugins to Cloudian and MinIO. When it comes to object storage, Cloudian is one of the leaders in the space, and Hyperstore, the company’s Kubernetes-enabled private cloud lightweight software extension will allow developers to write applications on Cloudian’s native S3-API platform and deploy them in the public cloud, thereby solving the problem of application portability.  MinIO with the vSAN Data Persistence Platform will speed the deployment of enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-orchestrated applications. It also introduces a server-based, scale-out architecture for mixed workloads that now extend to modern applications that require Kubernetes and object storage.  Sheldon D’Paiva, director of product marketing for VMware’s Cloud Platform business unit, said Cloudian’s plugin will cater to a range of use cases from cloud-native and high performance applications with big data, to analytics, file tiering and data protection. Meanwhile, MinIO’s focus on high performance will be best suited for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), web and mobile application development, analytics, container registries, and backup use cases, he explained. VMware vSAN is the basis for the vendor’s hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) that combines storage, compute, networking and virtualization. But as application workloads grow, keeping storage and compute tied together can leave resources stranded across HCI clusters. vSAN HCI Mesh is VMware’s software-based approach to disaggregating HCI compute and storage. This feature allows multiple vSAN clusters to create a disaggregated, cross-cluster architecture. It takes the issue of unused capacity off the table by making more efficient use of storage capacity. D’Paiva said the company has plans to continue building out enhancements in this area. NSX-T 3.1 includes NSX Federation, which enables enterprises to create global and stretched gateways and segments to extend unified security policies across multi-region VMware Cloud Foundation deployments. The new version allows enterprises to manage multiple large-scale deployments of cloud-native applications that run in bare metal servers, multi-hypervisors, and public cloud environments with a single interface, D’Paiva said. “But how do I protect the workloads that are running on the system, how do I detect threats that are coming into the network, and how do I look at external threats coming through the load balancer or the web application firewall,” asked D’Paiva rhetorically. VMware put its new security assets on full display in the Cloud Foundation update, folding in acquired technology from Avi Networks, Carbon Black, and Lastline to beef up endpoint and workload protection, threat prevention, load balancer, and web application firewall detection. The new releases come on the heels of the virtualization giant’s goal to “pave the world with VMware Kubernetes.” However, to do this, it has to get developers on board, which requires boosting its reputation with the open source community. This partnership announcement checks both boxes as DevOps are the open source object storage company’s bread and butter.  “We’re really thrilled to continue on a rapid pace of delivering to make the platform developer ready in addition to it being a great platform for traditional business critical enterprise applications,” D’Paiva said. MinIO co-founder and CEO Anand Babu Periasamy echoed this sentiment in an earlier interview. The vSAN Data Persistence platform “builds a bridge into each other’s respective worlds,” he said.