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  • Envoy Gateway Makes Using Envoy Proxy Easier for Developers and Reverses Fragmentation

    San Francisco, CA and Valencia, SPAIN — May 16, 2022 — Members of the steering group for Envoy Gateway (EG), including Envoy creator Matt Klein and representatives from Ambassador Labs, Fidelity Investments, Tetrate, and VMware, Inc. today announced their joint commitment to the project, which launched today at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Europe 2022, under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®). Envoy Gateway is a new effort within the Envoy proxy open source project to simplify Envoy use in cloud-native application development. 

    Envoy Gateway will reduce existing, redundant efforts around Envoy and make it much easier for application developers to use Envoy as a basic API gateway “out of the box” and as a Kubernetes Ingress controller. Exposing a simplified set of APIs, and implementing the Kubernetes Gateway API, EG makes it easier to extend Envoy. Developers will now have a cost-free, unfettered way to provide external access to their work in progress. At the same time, Envoy Gateway will not replace API management features currently found in commercial products.  

    “Envoy has achieved a great deal of success since we first released it in 2016,” said Matt Klein, founder of the Envoy proxy project. “And community has been at the heart of Envoy from the beginning. With the community-driven Envoy Gateway project, we see the opportunity to make Envoy accessible to many more users through the addition of simplified APIs and new capabilities explicitly targeted at north-south / edge proxy use cases.”

    Envoy is already widely used for traffic between separate services in a microservices application – that is, east-west traffic. With Envoy Gateway, Envoy will also be easy to use for north-south traffic—that traffic between an application and the outside world, as with consumers of an application’s APIs. 

    Envoy Gateway—Core Open Source Infrastructure for the Cloud-Native Future

    IT organizations worldwide want to establish and use a rich, robust, modern stack of open source software for cloud-native application development and delivery, under the management of organizations such as the Linux Foundation and the CNCF. Commercial offerings and projects within each IT team can then add value on top of this core infrastructure.  

    Envoy is fast becoming the go-to networking substrate within this modern, cloud-native stack. However, recently, the need for API access, traffic routing, and other ingress capabilities has led to fragmentation in the Envoy ecosystem. Envoy Gateway will bring this needed functionality back into the main Envoy project and make it less confusing and time-consuming for developers to access Envoy. 

    Implementation Via Kubernetes Gateway API

    Envoy Gateway will expose a version of the Kubernetes-native Gateway API, with Envoy-specific extensions. This is an expressive, extensible, role-oriented API well-suited to use by developers. Gateway API is either implemented, or in progress, for Istio, the Contour project (which originated at VMware), Emissary-Ingress (which originated at Ambassador Labs), and others. 

    When users create Gateway API resources, they will be translated into native Envoy API calls, so Envoy and its native API, xDS, will not need to be changed to add this new support. 

    Advantages for Developers, Infrastructure Administrators and Business Decision-Makers

    Application developers will experience the most positive impact from Envoy Gateway. They will be able to run Envoy Gateway and begin routing traffic to their applications. They will no longer need to build their own control plane, or extend an existing control plane such as a Go or Java control plane, or bring in a vendor solution at the early stages of their projects. They can just configure routes for the application and share them.  

    Infrastructure administrators will be able to easily offer an Envoy-native experience to application teams, without needing to adopt a vendor solution just to get basic gateway functionality. They will be able to manage instances of Envoy Gateway without interfering with developer access to them. Envoy Gateway will allow them to deliver consistent application networking capabilities across heterogeneous environments.  

    Executives and decision makers will have Envoy as a standard and, we expect, widely used solution for API access and Kubernetes ingress. They will also benefit from faster and easier development and delivery of more secure and robust software and services. 

    Additional Resources

    • Explore CNCF announcements. 
    • Review the official blog of the Envoy project.
    • Learn more about Envoy Gateway goals.

    About Envoy

    Originally created by Matt Klein and built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures. Built on the learnings of solutions such as NGINX, HAProxy, hardware load balancers, and cloud load balancers, Envoy runs alongside every application and abstracts the network by providing common features in a platform-agnostic manner. When all service traffic in an infrastructure flows via an Envoy mesh, it becomes easy to visualize problem areas via consistent observability, tune overall performance, and add substrate features in a single place. 

    Contact Matt Klein at mattklein123@gmail.com. 

    About Ambassador Labs

    Ambassador Labs, the cloud native developer experience leader, enables developers to code, test, ship, and run applications faster and easier than ever. Maker of top Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open source projects, including Emissary-ingress and Telepresence, Ambassador Labs delivers a developer control plane for Kubernetes that integrates the development, deployment, and production infrastructure for developers and organizations worldwide including Microsoft, PTC, NVidia, and Ticketmaster. Ambassador Labs is backed by top investors including Insight Partners and Matrix Partners. Learn more and get started for free at www.getambassador.io.

    Contact Lisa Williams of Ambassador Labs at lisawilliams@datawire.io.

    About Fidelity Investments

    Fidelity’s mission is to inspire better futures and deliver better outcomes for the customers and businesses we serve. With assets under administration of $11.3 trillion, including discretionary assets of $4.2 trillion as of March 31, 2022, we focus on meeting the unique needs of a diverse set of customers. Privately held for over 75 years, Fidelity employs more than 57,000 associates who are focused on the long-term success of our customers. For more information about Fidelity Investments, visit www.fidelity.com/about-fidelity/our-company. 

    Contact Kathleen Bentley of Fidelity Investments at kathleen.bentley@fmr.com. 

    About Tetrate

    Started by Istio founders to reimagine application networking, Tetrate is an enterprise service mesh company managing the complexity of modern, hybrid cloud application infrastructure. Its flagship product, Tetrate Service Bridge, provides an edge-to-workload application connectivity platform to deliver business continuity, agility, and security for enterprises on the journey from traditional monoliths to the cloud. Customers get consistent, baked-in observability, runtime security and traffic management in any environment. Tetrate remains a top contributor to the open-source projects Istio and Envoy Proxy. Find out more at www.tetrate.io. 

    Contact Annie Fink of Bospar at annie@bospar.com. 

    About VMware 
    VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. As a trusted foundation to accelerate innovation, VMware software gives businesses the flexibility and choice they need to build the future. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to building a better future through the company’s 2030 Agenda. For more information, please visit www.vmware.com/company.

    Contact Eloy Ontiveros of VMware Global Communications at eontiveros@vmware.com.

  • Newly Independent VMware to Focus on Multi-Cloud

    Newly Independent VMware to Focus on Multi-Cloud

    As an independent company once again, VMware will focus its efforts on providing management planes that span multiple cloud computing environments after officially spinning out of Dell Technologies.

    Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president for the cloud-native apps business unit at VMware, said the company now has a unique opportunity to work closely with providers of cloud services, builders of on-premises IT infrastructure and providers of telecommunications services.

    The terms of the spin-off included an $11.5 billion special cash dividend that resulted in a $27.40 per share dividend payment to all VMware stockholders. VMware claims the simplified financial structure that arises from the deal will provide it with additional operational and financial flexibility.

    Going forward, much of the development work will focus on providing management planes that not only span multiple clouds but also address specific cross-platform requirements such as security. It’s not likely there will ever be one single uber control plane for all of IT, noted O’Farrell. Rather, IT teams should expect VMware to deliver a series of well-integrated control planes to automate specific tasks in a way that breaks down IT silos, he said.

    VMware, however, under terms of its existing alliance, will also continue to work closely with Dell to create server environments that are optimized for VMware hypervisor platforms, O’Farrell said.

    Key to the strategy is a portfolio of observability tools that VMware plans to continue to expand, noted O’Farrell. VMware will also address the requirements of both traditional monolithic applications running on virtual machines as well as cloud-native applications running on distributions of Kubernetes, such as VMware Tanzu, that may be deployed on top of a hypervisor or on a bare-metal server, he added.

    Given the complex state of IT environments today, it’s all but inevitable something will go wrong, said O’Farrell. The challenge and the opportunity for VMware is to provide IT teams with the observability tools required to discover as many issues as possible before they adversely impact the business, he added. Once those issues are discovered, IT teams should be able to automate the remediation process using the rest of the portfolio of VMware management frameworks, he noted.

    Those management frameworks will also provide the foundation for unifying traditional approaches to IT service management (ITSM) with DevOps best practices that are now being used more widely, especially to manage cloud-native applications, said O’Farrell.

    When it comes to on-premises IT environments, VMware continues to dominate. Its hypervisor is, by far, the most widely used on servers in local data centers. VMware has spent much of the last two years expanding its reach into multiple clouds to enable IT organizations to standardize on a series of management frameworks. The goal is to reduce the total cost of IT by reducing reliance on what would otherwise be a hodgepodge of isolated management frameworks. The challenge VMware regularly encounters is the IT teams that manage cloud computing environments are not always the same ones that are managing on-premises IT environments. As such, many IT teams that have deployed cloud applications tend to embrace the management frameworks provided by their cloud services provider.

    VMware, however, is betting that as more organizations look to reduce the total cost of IT, the economic pressure to converge IT management using its frameworks will be simply too great to ignore.

  • AttackIQ Helps VMware NSX Customers Validate Efficacy of Their Network Security Controls

    AttackIQ Helps VMware NSX Customers Validate Efficacy of Their Network Security Controls

    Santa Clara, CA, June 10, 2021 – AttackIQ®, a leading independent vendor of Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) systems, today announced the company is working with VMware to enable VMware NSX customers to improve the way they validate the efficacy of their network security controls. Using the AttackIQ Security Optimization Platform with the MITRE ATT&CK framework, mutual customers can now leverage the power of automation to continually emulate realistic attacks and prove that controls are working as expected to help protect them from breaches and attacks.

    “As we have seen from supply-chain and ransomware intrusions, organizations need to assume breach and adopt advanced security capabilities to prevent successful attacks,” said Carl Wright, AttackIQ Chief Commercial Officer. “VMware is one of the world’s leading security providers, and we are excited to work with the VMware team to elevate our mutual customer’s security program performance.”

    “While traditional penetration testing and red teaming can provide useful insights into security control effectiveness, their infrequent scheduling and limited scope fail to provide holistic, up-to-the minute data during security proof of values,” said Chad Skipper, Global Security Technologist at VMware. “AttackIQ will enable VMware NSX customers to proactively validate NSX Advanced Threat Prevention controls against emulated adversary behaviors, with the end result being increased confidence in their cybersecurity performance.”

    AttackIQ conducts automated security testing to improve program performance

    AttackIQ operates under the “assume breach” mindset, recognizing that it is not a question of if but when an intruder will break past an organization’s perimeter defense. Aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, AttackIQ’s Security Optimization platform contains a deep library of adversary emulation scenarios to emulate post-breach adversary behaviors and continuously validate an organization’s defenses. The Security Optimization Platform tests and validates security controls continuously, safely, at scale and in production.

    By combining AttackIQ with VMware NSX, teams can gain comprehensive, data-driven control over their security program through continuous testing. With clear performance data generated from AttackIQ’s automated testing capabilities, security teams identify program challenges, adjust their security program operations, and make data-informed decisions about their security investments. The outcome is that the organization’s security controls work as intended, resources are aligned to address the most important threats, and the organization maximizes its return on investment.

    VMware simplifies network security by leveraging the infrastructure to protect apps and data from endpoint to cloud. By virtualizing the network security stack, companies gain better protection that is built into the infrastructure to help mitigate risks and enable compliance, lower costs, and simplify operations. The VMware NSX security family includes the VMware NSX Service-defined Firewall, a distributed, scale-out internal firewall purpose-built to protect east-west network traffic, and VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention for network detection and response capabilities with network traffic analysis, distributed IDS/IPS, and advanced malware analysis. These solutions provide deep visibility into network traffic regardless of whether it is north-south or east-west and are coupled with advanced machine learning techniques. As a result, cybersecurity teams can respond to advanced threats more quickly and effectively by providing high-fidelity alerts with a very low rate of false positives, plus visualize the entire attack chain.

    About AttackIQ

    AttackIQ, the leading independent vendor of breach and attack simulation solutions, built the industry’s first Security Optimization Platform for continuous security control validation and improving security program effectiveness and efficiency. AttackIQ is trusted by leading organizations worldwide to plan security improvements and verify that cyberdefenses work as expected, aligned with the MITRE ATT&CK framework. The Company is committed to giving back to the cybersecurity community through its free AttackIQ Academy, open Preactive Security Exchange, and partnership with the MITRE Center for Threat-Informed Defense. For more information visit www.attackiq.com. Follow AttackIQ on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

    VMware and NSX are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. 

  • VMware Enhances Management Portfolio

    VMware Enhances Management Portfolio

    VMware today rolled out a series of updates to its automation and monitoring portfolio as part of an ongoing effort to simplify management of highly distributed IT environments.

    Updates to the VMware vRealize Cloud automation portfolio include VMware vRealize Automation 8.4’s tighter integration with the open source Salt automation framework the company gained by acquiring SaltStack last year, in addition to a range of tools for provisioning and governing instances of VMware software running on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    There is also a set of tools to enable organizations running NSX network virtualization software for vSphere to migrate to NSX-T, an instance of network virtualization software that can be deployed anywhere.

    VMware vRealize Operations, meanwhile, is being updated to support a total of 57 AWS services along with the ability to predict the cost of deploying VMware Cloud on AWS. The latter capability includes tracking potential savings generated by powering off idle or unused virtual machines as well as snapshots, orphaned disks and oversized virtual machines. There are also now ten additional dashboards for tracking various costs, including return on investment, total cost of ownership and potential cost savings. IT teams can also more easily track capacity utilization trends on AWS.

    VMware is adding support for the open source Telegraf Agent to enable IT teams to collect metrics from any platform, in addition to providing an update to VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.4 and vRealize Log Insight Cloud that enables these monitoring tools to store data collected from multiple cloud services more efficiently. IT teams will also be able to collect logs from both Microsoft Azure and AWS.

    Finally, VMware is expanding its network monitoring tools to provide greater visibility across multiple clouds.

    Fidelma Russo, senior vice president and general manager for cloud services at VMware, said the rate at which IT teams are consuming the software-as-a-service (SaaS) editions of VMware management and observability tools or full-blown managed services has increased sharply since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, as IT teams managed on-premises and cloud instances of VMware software from home.

    It’s not clear what percentage of VMware’s installed base are now consuming the company’s automation and monitoring tools, but as the number of VMware instances deployed on public clouds increases alongside on-premises IT environments, so, too, do the management challenges. The choice IT teams generally have to make is deciding between automation and observability tools that are optimized for a specific platform versus adopting frameworks that work more broadly. With the acquisition of Salt and support for Telgraf, it is apparent VMware is moving to expand the reach of its management portfolio beyond its own software.

    In the meantime, IT teams are not only being asked to manage more complex IT environments, but the expectation that, through automation, they will be able to more effectively implement cost controls. This is happening at a time when many organizations have not been quite so sensitive to the total cost of IT. The challenge, of course, is those organizations are being asked to spend money on automation today in the hopes of spending less because of it tomorrow.

  • VMware Refreshes vRealize Cloud Management to Better Optimize, Protect and Modernize Customers’ Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments

    Customers IHS Markit and Provident Mexico Benefit from VMware vRealize Cloud Management Solutions

     

    PALO ALTO, Calif., February 4, 2021 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced innovations across its VMware vRealize Cloud Management portfolio of on-premises and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. The new and enhanced capabilities combine to enable customers to more securely deploy and operate their hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

    VMware customers IHS Markit and Provident México are using VMware vRealize Cloud Management solutions to attain greater IT and business agility for faster achievement of business outcomes.

    “In today’s uncertain world, enterprises are seeking to increase agility and efficiencies to remain competitive and to drive faster business growth,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. “As more businesses pursue cloud as an agility strategy, vRealize Cloud Management helps customers run their applications anywhere while maintaining consistent operations and common governance across all environments.”

    Consistent Deployment and Operations of Apps, Infrastructure and Platform Services

    VMware vRealize Cloud Management enables customers to consistently deploy and operate their applications, infrastructure, and platform services, from the data center to the cloud to the edge. It helps them accelerate innovation with quick and easy access to services, gain efficiency by improving visibility and automation, and improve control while mitigating risk through unified operations and governance. Today, VMware introduces new releases including VMware vRealize Automation 8.3, VMware vRealize Operations 8.3, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.3, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.3 VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and VMware Skyline; along with enhancements across VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud, and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud.

    Enhanced Event and Data-Driven Infrastructure Automation

    VMware vRealize Automation 8.3 delivers enhanced solutions for customers’ most critical automation use cases including self-service multi-clouds, network automation, and DevOps with actionable insights, greater security and improved performance. New VMware vRealize Automation capabilities include:

    • Property Groups: The ability to create, update, read and delete property groups with predefined data. This helps customers work more efficiently by reusing groups of properties, tracking resource usage and storing metadata. vRealize Automation makes the VMware Cloud Templates development more powerful and dynamic by reusing these attributes and keeping them up to date.
    • Security Properties: The ability to create a secure variable in Cloud Assembly and apply it to a cloud template or ABX action. This enables customers to better secure sensitive data in encrypted form and introduces a new method to produce secure variables for project and consumption.
    • VMware NSX-V to NSX-T migration: This release now supports NSX-V to NSX-T migration enabling customers to benefit from multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud networking, declarative APIs for full stack automation, built-in distributed security, advanced threat protection with intrusion detection and prevention, network threat analysis, unified networking and security for cloud native applications, and consistent policy and streamlined operations across deployments.

    Additionally, this new release delivers improved performance, deployment speed, increased efficiency and helps complete tasks quicker. This includes reducing the time it takes to deploy a virtual machine — a 2x improvement from vRealize Automation 8.2. (1) The new release also enables customers to distribute a deployment across cloud zones via enhancements in placement logic.

    Improved Security for AI-Powered Operations

    VMware vRealize Operations delivers self-driving operations from apps to infrastructure to better optimize, plan and scale private, hybrid, and multi cloud environments. Powered by AI and predictive analytics, vRealize Operations delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, proactive planning, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance. VMware vRealize Operations 8.3 and VMware vRealize Operations Cloud feature:

    • Data Security Standards: VMware vRealize Operations 8.3 modules meet Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 and follow the Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for U.S. Federal data security requirements.
    • VMware Cloud Configuration Maximums: Provides customers with better visibility into their VMware Cloud limits and their consumption relative to those limits.

     

    VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud introduces enhanced ML analytics for errors and Knowledge Base (KB) correlation, ERI-FIPS compliance, VMware HCX and VMware Site Recovery Manager log integration, and native data archiving support.

    Network Visibility and Troubleshooting for Applications, Networks, and Security

    VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud provide an end-to-end network view by learning from multiple data sources across virtual and physical infrastructure. Using machine learning for application discovery as well as assurance and verification capabilities, vRealize Network Insight makes it easier to plan, build, and manage complex networks. This new release includes:

    Customization: Enhancements to Pinboards for users to customize persistent dashboards to preserve widget filter state at the time of pinning the ability to see others’ pinboards in the Auditor role, as well as new abilities to allow users to pin no result pins;

    • Multi-Cloud: VMware Cloud on AWS edge router interface statistics for improved network troubleshooting;
    • NSX-T Integrations: Data from NSX Intelligence can now be integrated for more application-centric network operations and troubleshooting visibility; and,
    • VMware SD-WAN: New analytics intent for better service level agreement (SLA) monitoring and visibility with SD-WAN link utilization and metering.

    Increased Visibility into Potential Issues and Support Requests Across Teams

    VMware Skyline provides proactive intelligence across customers’ VMware environments to help prevent issues and unscheduled downtime. The latest release of Skyline Advisor provides expanded visibility into the vulnerabilities Skyline identifies and improved Support Request visibility enables easier use of the Log Assist automated log upload feature. This release also includes 31 new proactive Findings and Recommendations.

    • Findings Catalog: New catalog provides increased visibility into all the at-risk issues and vulnerabilities that Skyline checks.
    • Improved Support Request Visibility: A top customer request, this new feature provides Skyline Administrators with visibility of Support Requests across teams, making it easier to leverage Log Assist for automated support log bundle upload.

     

    IHS Markit Automates Cloud Environment for Competitive Edge

    IHS Markit is a business information provider headquartered in London, serving

    more than 50,000 business and government customers worldwide. To speed its time to market, the company uses vRealize Cloud Management offerings including vRealize Network Insight with VMware NSX-T to help release products faster to maintain a competitive edge.

    “We are making VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud IHS Markit’s standard tool for application, network and security visibility and troubleshooting,” said Andrew Hrycaj, Principal Network Engineer, IHS Markit.

    Provident México Speeds Innovation with Cloud Adoption

    Financial services firm Provident México sought to drive business growth by moving all of its applications to the cloud. After selecting VMware Cloud on AWS to run workloads and apps, Provident México used vRealize Cloud Management to reduce its migration risk. The solution empowered IT leaders at the firm to optimize application delivery infrastructure and innovate faster to meet business speed and agility requirements. Specifically, Provident México has improved its efficiency, lowered its risk and reduced its overall capacity requirements by 30% when comparing consumption of on-premises and cloud environments.

     

    “It’s intimidating to think about putting high-value workloads in the cloud, especially in financial services, but adopting cloud is both necessary and practical to achieve IT and business goals,” said Néstor Rodríguez, Director of Technology and Change, Provident Mexico. “It used to take me around a year and a half just to place an application in production. With VMware vRealize Cloud Management, I now do it within months. It’s a game changer.”

     

    Product Availability

    VMware vRealize Automation 8.3, VMware vRealize Operations 8.3, VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.3, VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.3 VMware vRealize Network Insight 6.1 and Skyline Advisor are available. The new capabilities and enhancements to VMware vRealize Operations Cloud, VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud and VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud are also available.

    Additional Resources

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  • Dell Technologies Advances Hybrid Cloud Strategy

    Dell Technologies, in collaboration with VMware and Google, today advanced its hybrid cloud strategy by making its CloudFS storage system available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and adding support for VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 to its VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms for on-premises IT environments.

    Varun Chhabra, vice president of product marketing for Dell Technologies, said both moves are part of Dell’s ongoing effort to provide IT organizations with a consistent cloud operating model spanning both on-premises IT environments and public clouds.

    In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Dell is more aggressively making a case for reducing IT costs by consolidating the management of multiple clouds.

    Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO for the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware, said current spending levels on multiple cloud platforms are unsustainable. However, that doesn’t mean IT organizations should consolidate clouds. Rather, he said, organizations need to streamline the management of multiple clouds to reduce costs.

    VMware has been making a case for deploying its VMware vSphere platform both on-premises and on public clouds from Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others to make it easier to build and deploy application workloads as organizations best see fit. Just because an application workload was created on a specific public cloud, for example, it doesn’t follow that workload needs to be deployed on that platform, Colbert said.

    At the same time, VMware has been making a case for deploying cloud-native workloads based on Kubernetes on top of VMware vSphere as well. VMware Cloud Foundation 4 provides access to a complete stack of infrastructure software that includes a distribution of Kubernetes that has been embedded in the latest update to VMware vSphere. VMware also provides a VMware Tanzu cloud service that can be employed to build, manage and deploy containerized applications across multiple distributions of Kubernetes.

    In effect, VMware and Dell are pushing to extend a management plane that is already widely deployed in on-premises IT environments to encompass both monolithic and microservices-based applications running in the cloud. There may be more workloads moving into the cloud than ever, but Colbert noted the bulk of application workloads and data still reside in on-premises IT environments.

    While Dell and VMware may have an advantage because of the number of IT organizations that already rely on its platforms to manage IT, every provider of a rival platform is making a similar hybrid cloud computing case. AWS, for example, is enabling VMware vSphere to run on its cloud while simultaneously pushing adoption of its infrastructure in on-premises IT environments as an alternative to platforms from Dell and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE).

    It may be a while before IT organizations define their hybrid cloud computing strategies. Most IT organizations today continue to manage IT environments in isolation from one another. However, the pressure to reduce the number of specialists required to manage each IT platform is mounting. Most IT organizations are being directed to do more with less regardless of how complex the IT environment becomes. The challenge now is figuring out how best to automate the management of what by any measure is now a confusing mix of platforms and workloads.

  • VMware Carbon Black Developer Day 2020: Bringing DevSecOps to the Fore

    VMware Carbon Black Developer Day 2020: Bringing DevSecOps to the Fore

    Developer Day is a VMware Carbon Black’s virtual event that connects intermediate to advanced security developers with Carbon Black experts to learn advanced API and integration techniques. The event takes place Tuesday, May 12, starting at 11 a.m. EST.

    Developer Day, which occurs the day before VMware Carbon Black’s Connect 2020 virtual conference, focuses on automating workflows by integrating the security stack. Attendees will hear from the VMware Carbon Black developer relations team, as well as their partners who have implemented the product APIs.

    Here’s what attendees can expect at this year’s Developer Day:

    • How to build an open source toolkit to enable security operations using Carbon Black’s complete platform API.
    • How to use Red Canary’s suite of tools to enable a variety of security operations.
    • Demos of the latest capabilities.
    • How to get started with Carbon Black Cloud Event Forwarder.
    • Explore the Binary Analysis SDK, the newest addition to the developer toolbox at Carbon Black Cloud.
    • A demo of a bidirectional integration between VMware Carbon Black EDR and Lastline Defender.
    • Discover what’s coming in the Carbon Black Developer Network.

    Participants will have a chance to be entered into a raffle to win Developer Day swag and other prizes. For more information and to register, visit the Developer Day website.

    Hear more about Developer Day as Scott Lundgren, CTO of VMware Carbon Black, discusses what’s in store during the four-hour event with MediaOps Managing Editor Charlene O’Hanlon.

  • VMware Makes vRealize Automation Framework Available via the Cloud

    VMware Makes vRealize Automation Framework Available via the Cloud

    VMware this week announced it has made a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of its vRealize automation platform generally available.

    Taruna Gandhi, senior director for product and technical marketing at VMware, said VMware vRealize Operation Cloud will make IT automation more accessible to a broader swath of organizations that might not be able to implement IT automation on their own.

    The vRealize Operations Cloud service provides all the same capabilities as the on-premises edition of vRealize with the added benefit of being integrated with other VMware Cloud services, including VMware Cloud on AWS.

    In general, Gandhi said VMware is seeing increased adoption of IT automation frameworks occurring in three phases. In the first phase, IT teams are automating internal processes primarily for their own benefit. In the second phase, IT operations teams set up self-service portals for developers. In the third phase, organizations embrace DevOps processes to provide developers with the equivalent of a cloud computing experience spanning both on-premises and public cloud computing resources.

    Most existing VMware customers are still in the first or second phases, but over time Gandhi said VMware expects organizations to adopt DevOps practices as part of a more aggressive effort to reduce costs during the current economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic while accelerating the rate at which applications are deployed and updated.

    The VMware vRealize Operations Cloud will play a significant role in accelerating that transition because it makes IT automation available as a service rather than a platform that needs to be deployed and maintained by an internal IT department. The beta test for vRealize Operations Cloud spanned dozens of customers that put more than 130,000 virtual machines under management across 120-plus vCenters and more than 10 VMware Cloud on AWS deployments, Gandhi said, noting the next phase will to see IT organizations begin to centralize the management of multiple cloud silos that have sprung up over the last several years within most organizations.

    There are, of course, no shortage of options these days when it comes to IT automation frameworks. VMware is making a case for vRealize as a natural extension of the VMware management tools that many organizations employ to manage VMware virtual machines that are widely used across most enterprise IT environments. VMware is now extending the reach of those tools to enable IT teams to also manage containers and even rival virtual machine platforms, noted Gandhi.

    Most of those IT organizations are now struggling to manage IT environments that have become more complex at a time when the pressure to employ higher levels of automation to rein in costs is rising sharply. It remains to be seen how IT organizations will respond to that imperative as pressure to either cap or reduce IT headcount continues to mount. Of course, not every sector of the economy is experiencing the same pressure. There are high-growth segments involving, for example, educational or entertainment services. Regardless of industry, however, it’s clear IT teams are being asked to do a lot more sooner with either the same or fewer resources.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Starts to Make DevSecOps Case

    VMware Starts to Make DevSecOps Case

    VMware, at the VMworld 2019 conference this week, strengthened its case for an application-centric approach to cybersecurity via updates to VMware AppDefense along with acquiring Intrinsic, a provider of a set of tools for securing serverless computing frameworks.

    VMware AppDefense layers a distributed service layered on top of the Platinum Edition of VMware Sphere platform that enables organizations to create a framework for whitelisting interactions between applications. Updates to the VMware AppDefense now enable organizations to run vulnerability reports across an entire application and virtual infrastructure stack along with support for integrity checks for the Windows operating system kernel.

    At the same time, VMware vSphere Platinum has now gained visibility and anomaly detection with automated reputation analysis for processes and network behaviors on a per-virtual machine basis. That capability is enabled by a collaboration with Kenna Security to feed risk-based data vulnerability metrics into the VMware AppDefense App Verification Cloud service.

    Additional capabilities include being able to initiate remediation actions based on the potential severity of a vulnerability, such as killing processes and network connections, and the ability to initiate remediation actions via the VMware NSX network virtualization overlay.

    At the same time, VMware also revealed that a future version of VMware AppDefense would also incorporate the technology that Intrinsic developed for securing serverless computing frameworks.

    Tom Corn, senior vice president and general manager for security products, said that move represents the first effort to extend the reach of AppDefense to include cloud-native computing environments. VMware AppDefense, coupled with an endpoint security service VMware is about to gain with the acquisition of Carbon Black, are at the core of its DevSecOps strategy, and rather than thinking in terms of endpoints at devices, the company will employ Carbon Black to secure applications as though they are the endpoint, he said.

    In some cases, Corn noted, that will require organizations to embed a lightweight agent within their applications. However, in many cases, platforms such as vSphere or Workspace ONE software will serve as the enforcement point because they already will have the Carbon Black agent software embedded. The Carbon Black agent also will be integrated with VMware Secure State, a real-time security and configuration monitoring service.

    The goal is to reduce the number of conflicting agent software strewn across an enterprise by various silos of cybersecurity technologies that don’t do much more than increase the operational cost of cybersecurity, said Corn. VMware is pursuing a more proactive approach focused on securing the entire application environment. That approach includes the web application firewall the company gained by acquiring Avi Networks earlier this year, he said.

    VMware already had a multiyear technology alliance with Carbon Black, so it has a good chance of achieving this goal soon once the acquisition is completed. In addition, as part of its DevSecOps strategy, AppDefense is already integrated with a variety of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms, Corn said.

    It may be a while before VMware fully delivers on that DevSecOps promise, but at the very least the DevSecOps dialogue in the enterprise is about to be elevated significantly.

    — Mike Vizard

  • DevOps Deeper Dive: VMware Transformed

    DevOps Deeper Dive: VMware Transformed

    At the VMworld 2019 conference this week, VMware in no uncertain teams made it clear it wants to become a major DevOps force.

    Following the acquisition of sister company Pivotal Software last week, VMware is moving to build out an application development framework for building and deploying cloud-native applications based on Kubernetes. That effort coincides with ongoing investments in its vRealize Suite of management tools, through which VMware is committed to automating IT operations across both on-premises IT environments and public cloud computing environments.

    To advance those twin goals, VMware this week launched a series of Tanzu management tools for managing any distribution of Kubernetes while at the same time launching VMware hybrid cloud platform, which combines everything—from vRealize automation tools to the monitoring tools from Wavefront by VMware—to create a central console through which all of IT can be managed.

    [su_box title=”The VMware DevOps Timeline”]

    • October 2015 – Dell Acquires VMware along with EMC
    • April 2017 – VMware acquires Wavefront monitoring service
    • August 2017 – VMware shifts public cloud strategy via Amazon Web Services (AWS) alliance; VMware and sister company Pivotal Software unveil Kubernetes distribution
    • November 2017 – VMware Launches VRealize Management Suite
    • February 2018 – VMware acquires CloudCoreo to gain cloud configuration tools
    • August 2018 – VMware acquires CloudHealth Technologies to gain governance tools; VMware launches AppDefense to provide a zero-trust framework
    • November 2018 – VMware acquires Heptio for Kubernetes expertise
    • December 2018 – Dell acquires all VMware outstanding shares
    • May 2019 – VMware Acquires Bitnami for application packaging tools
    • July 2019 – VMware Acquires Avi Networks to gain Web Application Firewall (WAF); VMware Acquires Bitfusion for machine learning algorithms and GPU virtualization software
    • August 2019 – VMware Acquires Pivotal Software; VMware Acquires Carbon Black; VMware Launches Tanzu Platform to manage Kubernetes; VMware Unveils Hybrid Cloud Platform

    [/su_box]

    After deciding to launch a series of services through which it manages instances of its software on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and local servers from sister company Dell EMC, VMware has been slowly expanding its reach into the realm of applications. The most significant element of that thrust to date has been its acquisition of Pivotal, a provider of the widely used Spring framework based on Java and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment based on open source software from the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF).

    The CFF is in the process of migrating the application development environment created for Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes, a cloud-native container orchestration engine being developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Both the CFF and the CNCF are arms of the Linux Foundation. The rise of Kubernetes has resulted in many organizations shifting their application development strategies to a platform capable of supporting multiple application development environments.

    Prior to announcing the deal to be acquired by VMware, Pivotal cut its revenue forecast for fiscal 2020 by $40 to $50 million.

    VMware DevOps
    VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

    Pivotal Software spun out of VMware in 2013, so to a certain degree VMware’s move to acquire Pivotal represents something of a homecoming that last week was valued at $2.7 billion. Pivotal currently has about 350 customers, many of which are hosting a distribution of the Cloud Foundry PaaS on VMware platforms. VMware also tapped Pivotal to jointly develop a curated instance of Kubernetes, dubbed Pivotal Container Service (PKS), that is optimized for VMware platform. As part of that effort, VMware is also developing an instance of VMware vSphere that will run Kubernetes natively.

    At the VMworld 2019 conference, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger made it clear VMware plans to leverage Kubernetes to bridge the historical divide between developers and IT operations teams. In fact, he told attendees Kubernetes was the most important technology to emerge since the virtual machine was created. As part of that effort, Gelsinger noted that the acquisition of Pivotal coupled with the recent acquisition of Bitnami, a provider of tools for packaging applications, means there are now more 5 million developers participating in the VMware ecosystem.

    VMware is clearly hoping the developer ecosystem will expand as VMware makes it easier to launch virtual machines on every major public cloud as well as on-premises IT environments. VMware has faced a major challenge over the last several years as DevOps teams have bypassed internal IT teams to deploy applications on cloud services based on alternative virtual machines by AWS or Microsoft. Thanks to the inherent portability of Kubernetes, VMware is hoping organizations will now deploy cloud-native applications on VMware platforms. It remains to be seen, however, to what degree DevOps teams will embrace VMware on public clouds versus continuing to employ those virtual machines.

    When it comes to cloud-native computing, VMware is clearly playing catchup. VMware has 250 PKS customers today, while rivals such as Red Hat (now an arm of IBM) have already redeployed their application development and deployment platforms on Kubernetes as an alternative to the Cloud Foundry PaaS. On the plus side, VMware now claims to be the third-largest contributor to Kubernetes, thanks in part to its acquisition of Heptio, a provider of Kubernetes tools.

    In the meantime, there’s no question VMware is at the forefront of developing tools for automating the management and securing of IT infrastructure running its virtual machine software. Less clear is to what degree VMware will be able to translate that success to also unify application development and IT operations across multiple platforms a truly meaningful DevOps way, rather than merely bundling a suite of disparate tools together at a discount.

    — Mike Vizard