Hybrid cloud: existing *and* new apps

It was a busy week for the cloud twitterverse: trashing the new Gartner Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant was de rigeur early in the week because everyone knows that IT is dead and all applications are going to be being re-written to run on one of the clouds in the leaders� quadrant. Then, on Friday, AWS […]]> It was a busy week for the cloud twitterverse: trashing the new Gartner Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant was de rigeur early in the week because everyone knows that IT is dead and all applications are going to be being re-written to run on one of the clouds in the leaders� quadrant. Then, on Friday, AWS announced a management plug-in for VMware vCenter, prompting a rush of schadenfreude as this clearly means that VMware is “going to disappear” as all existing apps are going to be imported into an operationally incompatible cloud environment with no resiliency for existing apps and highly inconsistent performance (for all apps).

Both of these things can�t be simultaneously true, of course. But there are kernels of truth in both narratives that underscore the importance of a hybrid cloud strategy: public cloud has to evolve to support both existing and cloud-native applications, blend together on-prem and off-prem deployments, and address the key challenge of production application deployment, which is operations. The single most expensive part of any cloud deployment is the operations team, whether you�re doing DevOps or waterfall, or anything in between.

My colleague Chris Wolf has written a clear and lucid blog post on why this is the case, which I encourage you to read. Allowing IT organizations to extend their current modus operandi into a complimentary, compatible public IaaS service is central to the capabilities of vCloud Hybrid Service. That means being able to operate immediately with the apps you have and the team you have, jump starting the journey that is IaaS adoption. Your destination may very well look radically different to where you are today – you want to change how you operate to take advantage of the flexibility that cloud provides – but that doesn�t mean the journey has to be filled with giant leaps, downtime, re-writing everything multiple times, and huge operational risk.

I would also argue that when writing cloud-native applications, you want to write them once and not have to rewrite large chunks of your app if you choose to deploy somewhere else. When developing for hybrid cloud, the choice of deployment venue can be deferred until the later stages of the process. When developing for a pure public cloud, you choose the deployment venue at the beginning, and it�s very expensive to change your mind later. It’s no coincidence that there�s no �Export� button in AWS� new vCenter plug-in.

And so yes, I believe the best place to run a VMware virtualized app is VMware�s cloud, which you would expect me to say. But not because it�s super simple to bring your existing VMs to it, but because it allows you to get started with the operations you have today, and gives you unparalleled operational flexibility tomorrow.

via VMware Blogs http://bit.ly/1rEXnnH