Today was the first day of my first time ever at VMworld and it was an electrifying first experience to be here with my team for the reveal of Project Pacific — the Kubernetes in vSphere workload platform my team had worked hard on for the past few years. This summer, I have been privileged to join VMware as an intern with the vSphere and Project Pacific Product Management team, and I couldn’t ask for a better way to end my summer than at VMworld. Few things come close to the excitement of witnessing firsthand the public unveiling of Project Pacific and the buzz it’s creating. From starting off the day with a packed auditorium Monday General Session by CEO Pat Gelsinger introducing VMware Tanzu including Tanzu Mission Control and Project Pacific, to dropping in between breakouts to my team’s demo booth, it goes without saying that Project Pacific is the highlight of my day 1.
Monday General Session: VMware is changing the game for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud applications
CEO Pat Gelsinger kicked off Monday with an engaging General Session in which he discussed topics ranging from industry trends, the morality of technology, areas of impact, and VMware’s strategy in the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud domains. I was primarily engaged by his discussion of VMware Tanzu.
Some key points of interest:
- Welcome Pivotal! VMware announced the acquisition of Pivotal to expand their portfolio of services available to efficiently build, run, and manage Kubernetes application across any cloud and any platform. Pivotal fits into VMware’s multi-cloud strategy and VMware Tanzu portfolio.
- Welcome Carbon Black! Pat also announced the acquisition of Carbon Black to deliver enterprise-grade security for workloads, applications and networks spanning from device to cloud. Carbon Black fits into VMware’s multi-cloud security strategy.
VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of services to build modern apps, run enterprise Kubernetes, and manage Kubernetes for Devs and IT Ops. Tanzu will help you:
- Build Modern Apps: Bitnami allows for flexible and efficient packaging and deploying of modern apps, while Pivotal, a pioneer in microservices and containers, is a leading cloud native platform provider that greatly enables multi-cloud app development.
- Run Enterprise Kubernetes: Project Pacific is the rearchitecturing of vSphere with Kubernetes, extending vSphere for all modern application workloads, and enabling DevOps to collaborate more efficiently as well as empower developers and operators to work flexibly without overstepping or misaligning with the other. (More on this below!)
- Manage Multi-cloud, Multi-cluster, Multi-team: Tanzu Mission Control is a control plane that is cloud neutral and allows for the management of all Kubernetes clusters and workloads from one central control point.
Aside from these and other (which I won’t delve into here) important announcements about VMware’s technological innovation, I was heartened by presentations of VMware technology’s impact through partnerships such as with techsoup, and support for customers like Angel MedFlight. Beyond an interest in the technology that VMware brings to the table, to see the tangible and positive impacts accomplished by VMware products and people is among the coolest experiences I have at VMware and VMworld.
Introducing Project Pacific: Transforming vSphere into the App Platform of the Future
In this afternoon breakout session, Kit Colbert, CTO of Cloud Platform, discussed in depth why and how Project Pacific was tranforming vSphere. My team also used the above slide at our demo booth. To briefly explain it:
- Project Pacific embeds Kubernetes into the control plane of vSphere to unify control of compute, network, and storage resources. ESXi Clusters will also function as Kubernetes Clusters, and networking and storage will be integrated such that all three components will be manageable via the Kubernetes native interface.
- Modern applications are and will increasingly be built across Kubernetes Clusters, VMs, and vSphere Native Pods. Project Pacific will allow for a declarative specification for all types of objects in a workload, and will allow for an application workload to be managed as a unit instead of management of individual VMs and clusters.
- Developers get self-service access across namespaces and resource pools assigned to them by IT Ops; Operators get to set policy and manage across namespace units without worrying about the workloads running inside.
I will be presenting my own in depth look at Project Pacific soon on this blog, but for the time being, the following links in addition to the above hyperlinks provide a good first glance.
After spending the summer in internal discussion and seminars about Project Pacific through many changes in terminology and among a familiar team, it was very exciting to watch a presentation and dialogue with a fully engaged audience. I’m pretty excited to continue watching the ripple effect of Project Pacific discussion in the coming days and in subsequent breakout sessions.
We ❤ Project Pacific!
Amidst exploring Solution Exchange, hustling to attend different sessions throughout the day, and browsing all manners of online resources and VMworld social media engagement, the Project Pacific demo booth was a steadfast anchor to which I returned, each time to an engaged crowd gathered around my team. My first experience at VMworld thoroughly humbled and awed me more than I can process in this simple blog and single day’s reflection…nonetheless, onwards to day 2!
