6 ms·

VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure

65 points by liquidchicken 11y ago

walterclifford 11y ago
Can a mod (or OP) change this submission's title? "VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure" is an editorializing of "VMware's Cloud Adventure", especially since the word bumbling never occurs in the post. @OP HN guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- liquidchicken 11y ago
  My bad, lesson learned.
- simonebrunozzi 11y ago
  I agree with your suggestion (despite the fact that the additional word might be very accurate in this particular case).
  - outworlder 11y ago
    Also, the article's cloud illustration is not of a sunny day.
latchkey 11y ago
The stumble was that CloudFoundry sucked until EMC bought Pivotal [Labs] and tasked them with cleaning up the mess. VMware isn't the cloud, Pivotal is.
- justincormack 11y ago
  And now Pivotal may be sold.
- jeletonskelly 11y ago
  To be clear, Cloud Foundry is not a cloud provider. It's an abstraction layer between your applications and an actual cloud provider.
- mugsie 11y ago
  Until?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jacques_chester 11y ago
> They've already started that with containers. Docker orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and Mesos are still rough around the edges and there is room in the space for VMware to get in and leverage the benefit of their size and engineering bench. VMWare started doing this circa 2010-11. Eventually that project turned into the first version of Cloud Foundry. Edit: forgot my usual disclaimer that I work for Pivotal etc etc
- liquidchicken 11y ago
  I was really thinking about the vSphere integrated container stuff, but yes, that's a good point.
- jeletonskelly 11y ago
  Let's be honest though, CloudFoundry isn't a cloud. It's deployed onto a cloud provider like AWS and runs your apps on virtual machines inside an EC2 instance. It's useful if you want to abstract away your cloud provider, but it's not a cloud provider in and of itself. Disclaimer: Currently working with a customer deploying to Cloud Foundry.
  - jacques_chester 11y ago
    It just depends on what you mean by "a cloud". I usually refer to Cloud Foundry as a PaaS. It sits on top of an IaaS like AWS, OpenStack, Azure or vSphere, managed by BOSH.
pfarnsworth 11y ago
It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed. They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make the same amount of money. During that time that was mentioned, from 2006 until probably 2010/2011, AWS was great for small companies, but there were still issues with security, availability, reliability, etc, so VMware could get away with selling the private cloud. I mentioned this is another post that got a lot of vehement comments, but virtualization itself is dying. Not dead, but dying. Many large companies with their own datacenters are running off of bare metal, and this will be the trend going forward. Yes, virtualization is still in many private datacenters, but bare metal is how newer companies are going, and in 10 years, I bet virtualization will be gone from all but the slowest of private datacenters. It's a level of overheard now that has been completely circumvented as unnecessary for the most part, and it will fall into disfavor as more and more people learn techniques on how to avoid it altogether. This doesn't mean that VMware will be gone in 10 years. Even WinZip to this day has something like $50-75M/year in annual revenue. But it will be relegated as a legacy app.
- hodgesrm 11y ago
  Can you cite sources for your assertion that bare metal will eliminate virtualization for on-prem operation? This does not square with the emergence of technologies like software defined networking.
- tw04 11y ago
  I literally don't know of any large companies moving away from virtualization to bare metal. Where is that information coming from? I know of some that are deploying some things back to "bare metal" if that's what you want to call containers, but even in those instances, it's a very, VERY small subset of the larger environment.
  - simonebrunozzi 11y ago
tlogan 11y ago
VMware is 3Com of today.
zurn 11y ago
Despite being critical this sounds like the author is still wearing quite VMware-colored glasses: > Unfortunately, the world that they built is now eating them. Hypervisors became commodity, where "good enough" is an acceptable target. Hyper-V, Xen, KVM: they all became good enough for ecosystems to be built around them In reality VMware (and VirtualBox) were leapfrogged by platform native hypervisors quality-wise, at least on Linux. Which is inevitable since there isn't really any way to ship robust proprietary binary-only kernel drivers of this complexity there. (ESXi might be another story, but it's also not just a hypervisor, it's a whole stack of enterprisey proprietary infrastructure that you commit to instead of open systems, and hopping on that train is more a cultural/strategy/mindset choice than something based on technical hypervisor-vs-hypervisor benchmark)
- josteink 11y ago
  > (ESXi might be another story, but it's also not just a hypervisor, it's a whole stack of enterprisey proprietary infrastructure that you commit to instead of open systems, and hopping on that train is more a cultural/strategy/mindset choice than something based on technical hypervisor-vs-hypervisor benchmark) I may be wrong here, but I thought ESXi was the lightweight hypervisor-only product (which at the time was offered for free!), without all the enterprisey features or requirements. Basically Microsoft Windows Hyper-V without the need to boot an OS of its own.
  - op00to 11y ago
    Well, yes. It's a hypervisor only product. It also requires you to use VMware's tools to manage, and that closed architect poses road blocks to integrating it into a larger hybrid cloud environment. To basically do anything resembling what a real business would want, youd need to throw big bags of money at VMware to get more features. You can build all that in the open with KVM.
ghshephard 11y ago
I wasn't even aware that VMware had a cloud service, and I follow this stuff reasonably closely. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, Linode, Joyent - these are all the companies that I think of when I think of "Cloud Services" - I would have bet money that VMware wasn't providing this as a service.
josteink 11y ago
This article here might be relevant to the discussion: "Technology Lab / Information Technology VMware Fusion, Workstation team culled in company restructure" http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmware-fusion-workstation-team-culled-in-company-restructure/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmware... So they've lost the cloud... They're firing the desktop guys. Where do they plan to go?
elcct 11y ago
I've been using VMWare Workstation for years and it is awesome product reasonably priced, but other VMWare products are too expensive. I think they have missed opportunity there big time. There is nothing in their offering for startups for example.

65 points by liquidchicken 11y ago

Can a mod (or OP) change this submission's title? "VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure" is an editorializing of "VMware's Cloud Adventure", especially since the word bumbling never occurs in the post. @OP HN guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

liquidchicken 11y ago
My bad, lesson learned.
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
I agree with your suggestion (despite the fact that the additional word might be very accurate in this particular case).
- outworlder 11y ago
  Also, the article's cloud illustration is not of a sunny day.

latchkey 11y ago

The stumble was that CloudFoundry sucked until EMC bought Pivotal [Labs] and tasked them with cleaning up the mess. VMware isn't the cloud, Pivotal is.

justincormack 11y ago
And now Pivotal may be sold.
jeletonskelly 11y ago
To be clear, Cloud Foundry is not a cloud provider. It's an abstraction layer between your applications and an actual cloud provider.
mugsie 11y ago
Until?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jacques_chester 11y ago

> They've already started that with containers. Docker orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and Mesos are still rough around the edges and there is room in the space for VMware to get in and leverage the benefit of their size and engineering bench. VMWare started doing this circa 2010-11. Eventually that project turned into the first version of Cloud Foundry. Edit: forgot my usual disclaimer that I work for Pivotal etc etc

liquidchicken 11y ago
I was really thinking about the vSphere integrated container stuff, but yes, that's a good point.
jeletonskelly 11y ago
Let's be honest though, CloudFoundry isn't a cloud. It's deployed onto a cloud provider like AWS and runs your apps on virtual machines inside an EC2 instance. It's useful if you want to abstract away your cloud provider, but it's not a cloud provider in and of itself. Disclaimer: Currently working with a customer deploying to Cloud Foundry.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  It just depends on what you mean by "a cloud". I usually refer to Cloud Foundry as a PaaS. It sits on top of an IaaS like AWS, OpenStack, Azure or vSphere, managed by BOSH.

pfarnsworth 11y ago

It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed. They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make the same amount of money. During that time that was mentioned, from 2006 until probably 2010/2011, AWS was great for small companies, but there were still issues with security, availability, reliability, etc, so VMware could get away with selling the private cloud. I mentioned this is another post that got a lot of vehement comments, but virtualization itself is dying. Not dead, but dying. Many large companies with their own datacenters are running off of bare metal, and this will be the trend going forward. Yes, virtualization is still in many private datacenters, but bare metal is how newer companies are going, and in 10 years, I bet virtualization will be gone from all but the slowest of private datacenters. It's a level of overheard now that has been completely circumvented as unnecessary for the most part, and it will fall into disfavor as more and more people learn techniques on how to avoid it altogether. This doesn't mean that VMware will be gone in 10 years. Even WinZip to this day has something like $50-75M/year in annual revenue. But it will be relegated as a legacy app.

hodgesrm 11y ago
Can you cite sources for your assertion that bare metal will eliminate virtualization for on-prem operation? This does not square with the emergence of technologies like software defined networking.
tw04 11y ago
I literally don't know of any large companies moving away from virtualization to bare metal. Where is that information coming from? I know of some that are deploying some things back to "bare metal" if that's what you want to call containers, but even in those instances, it's a very, VERY small subset of the larger environment.
- simonebrunozzi 11y ago

tlogan 11y ago

VMware is 3Com of today.

zurn 11y ago

Despite being critical this sounds like the author is still wearing quite VMware-colored glasses: > Unfortunately, the world that they built is now eating them. Hypervisors became commodity, where "good enough" is an acceptable target. Hyper-V, Xen, KVM: they all became good enough for ecosystems to be built around them In reality VMware (and VirtualBox) were leapfrogged by platform native hypervisors quality-wise, at least on Linux. Which is inevitable since there isn't really any way to ship robust proprietary binary-only kernel drivers of this complexity there. (ESXi might be another story, but it's also not just a hypervisor, it's a whole stack of enterprisey proprietary infrastructure that you commit to instead of open systems, and hopping on that train is more a cultural/strategy/mindset choice than something based on technical hypervisor-vs-hypervisor benchmark)

josteink 11y ago
> (ESXi might be another story, but it's also not just a hypervisor, it's a whole stack of enterprisey proprietary infrastructure that you commit to instead of open systems, and hopping on that train is more a cultural/strategy/mindset choice than something based on technical hypervisor-vs-hypervisor benchmark) I may be wrong here, but I thought ESXi was the lightweight hypervisor-only product (which at the time was offered for free!), without all the enterprisey features or requirements. Basically Microsoft Windows Hyper-V without the need to boot an OS of its own.
- op00to 11y ago
  Well, yes. It's a hypervisor only product. It also requires you to use VMware's tools to manage, and that closed architect poses road blocks to integrating it into a larger hybrid cloud environment. To basically do anything resembling what a real business would want, youd need to throw big bags of money at VMware to get more features. You can build all that in the open with KVM.

ghshephard 11y ago

I wasn't even aware that VMware had a cloud service, and I follow this stuff reasonably closely. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, Linode, Joyent - these are all the companies that I think of when I think of "Cloud Services" - I would have bet money that VMware wasn't providing this as a service.

josteink 11y ago

This article here might be relevant to the discussion: "Technology Lab / Information Technology VMware Fusion, Workstation team culled in company restructure" http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmware-fusion-workstation-team-culled-in-company-restructure/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmware... So they've lost the cloud... They're firing the desktop guys. Where do they plan to go?

elcct 11y ago

I've been using VMWare Workstation for years and it is awesome product reasonably priced, but other VMWare products are too expensive. I think they have missed opportunity there big time. There is nothing in their offering for startups for example.