Office of the CTO - Steve Herrod
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A year has passed since VMware launched Cloud FoundryTM, a major milestone in our mission to "Simplify IT". We are focusing on simplifying application creation, deployment, and operations via an approach we call open platform as a service, or "Open PaaS" - an approach that gives developers choice as to where they deploy and run their applications.
Cloud Foundry debuted on April 12th 2011 as an open source project and has since garnered broad industry support, providing developers with a choice of frameworks, application services and multi-cloud deployment options. Cloud Foundry lets developers focus their energy on building applications while infrastructure is transparently delivered as a service.
We are celebrating Cloud Foundry's first birthday today at a live VMware event...and we have a lot to celebrate! We're announcing new partnerships, a new system for managing open source software contributions, new tools for operating large scale Cloud Foundry services and additional multi-cloud deployment choices. Slides from the event can be viewed here.
More Clouds
In one of my recent posts, I explained why preserving multi-cloud choice and flexibility is so important in the cloud era. Customers want to have the flexibility to move from a private cloud to a public cloud, from a public cloud to a private cloud or between public cloud providers, and not be locked into any particular cloud. As an open platform as a service, Cloud Foundry is designed to run on a wide variety of clouds and cloud infrastructure.
We sometimes say Cloud Foundry's goal is to be the "Linux of the cloud." Just as Linux provides a high degree of application portability across different hardware, Cloud Foundry provides a high level of application portability across different clouds and different cloud infrastructure. Developers don't want to have to rewrite their applications for every cloud and by virtue of its design and the fact it is open source, Cloud Foundry can be put on pretty much any cloud. Cloud Foundry can be deployed to almost any cloud infrastructure, including VMware's vCloud and vSphere, but also cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, "bare metal", CloudStack, Eucalyptus, Nimbula and OpenStack.
At today's event we will give our audience a live demo, showing how Cloud Foundry makes multi-cloud a reality with the deployment of an application to four different Cloud Foundry-based clouds - all running on different cloud infrastructure, within minutes and without any code or configuration changes. It will be something along the lines of this:
More Code
Today VMware also introduced and open sourced Cloud Foundry BOSH, an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and life cycle management of large-scale distributed services.
BOSH is designed to enable the systematic and prescriptive evolution of services, and also facilitates the operation of production instances of Cloud Foundry. BOSH automates a variety of cloud infrastructure and allows targeted service updates with consistent results and minimal to no down time. It is proved in the course of operating CloudFoundry.com.
BOSH is available under an Apache license from CloudFoundry.org and includes support for VMware vSphere as well as early support for Amazon Web Services.
Additional technical details on BOSH are available in GitHub.
More Community
Cloud Foundry has been an open source project since the day it was released, and is also active on GitHub. Cloud Foundry has seen broad and substantive contributions from the developer community including support for dozens of major developer frameworks and application services.
Today we rolled out the new CloudFoundry.org, an updated source code management system for Cloud Foundry. The system converges Cloud Foundry source code to a single set of public code repositories on GitHub integrated with Gerrit for code reviews and Jenkins for continuous integration. The new process simplifies community code contributions, improves code quality and offers greater visibility into code changes as they happen.
More Partners
There are a broad range of companies investing in and around Cloud Foundry. The ecosystem around Cloud Foundry includes development and tools providers, cloud management vendors, public cloud operators, application service developers and ISVs. Here are some of the industry players currently investing in Cloud Foundry:
Today we're welcoming five new companies into the Cloud Foundry ecosystem:
- Cloud9's browser-based integrated development environment now supports deployment to CloudFoundry.com.
- Collabnet is making Cloud Foundry a core deployment platform for their suite of agile enterprise development tools.
- ServiceMesh has added policy-driven deployment and governance of Cloud Foundry to their enterprise Agility PlatformTM.
- SOASTA's CloudTest Lite® rapid test creation and real-time analytics now offers support for Cloud Foundry deployment targets.
- X.commerce, eBay's open, end-to-end commerce technology platform, is building upon Cloud Foundry.
Thank you!
VMware remains as committed as ever to Cloud Foundry and we appreciate the tremendous support Cloud Foundry has received from its ecosystem of partners and strong open source contributions from the developer community. We will continue to deliver on our Open PaaS strategy and ensure developers have multi-cloud choice, flexibility and new technology for operating ever larger, ever more reliable cloud and application services.
For more information on Cloud Foundry please visit http://www.CloudFoundry.com
vFabric Application Director - welcome to the VMware portfolio! in Chief Technology Officer
Posted by herrod Mar 19, 2012Virtualization is the onramp to cloud computing, and management and automation capabilities unleash the full value of this technological shift. We’ve been busier than ever on the management and automation front, releasing new versions of vCenter, vCloud, and vFabric last week. There are lots of great capabilities to discuss in all of these, but today I would like to focus on VMware’s newest management product: vFabric Application Director. VMware’s management and automation efforts are aimed at simplifying and standardizing the delivery of Infrastructure (with vCloud Director, vCenter and vCenter Operations) as well as End User Services (with Horizon), and we extended this mission and strategy further to address three tier web applications and middleware.
Almost everyone in IT that I meet with acknowledges the significant complexity of current application deployment and sees PaaS (Platform as a Service) as an excellent destination for all types of applications. As we help customers move to the cloud, they begin to rethink how their applications are built, deployed and managed. Application Director offers customers a new approach to provisioning and managing applications, and allows IT to modernize applications without requiring significant changes to the way they operate today.
Last Friday’s launch of vFabric Application Director was VMware’s first big step towards easing application deployment on vSphere platforms, catering to the rich set of middleware services provided through vFabric and fully extensible to any middleware stack. Key benefits include:
- Enabling hybrid cloud (private or public) deployments through rich application modeling abilities, abstracting model from deployment environments
- Collaborative model for dev and operations teams that is easy to use and highly flexible
- Offering both developer agility and IT control through standardization of middleware components
Application Director’s design paradigm lets IT leverage their investments in previous technologies and processes, and helps to simplify and accelerate the delivery of new applications.
Application Director produces blueprints of applications that later be provisioned on any vSphere cloud
The vFabric Application Director team wrote a great blog about Friday’s release. And if you’re looking for more detailed product information, you can check out the vFabric Application Director product page or watch a demo of the product.
What a busy week with security at the forefront! RSA 2012 continues to be the premiere security conference in the industry. Cloud security and mobility have been the hot topics in the space, and continue to be for CIOs going into 2012.
RSA had a lot of interesting and well-attended sessions with our ecosystem of partners and new players as well. There was a Cloud Computing conference track that featured 29 breakout sessions - cloud security is mainstream now! And in fact, "cloud" and "virtual" yielded over 75 sessions presented at RSA 2012 - showing the interest amongst the end-user attendee base.
This week I had the opportunity to keynote at the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA; Allwyn Sequeira, our CTO of security, wrote a great blog discussing the key themes of the talk. In addition, EMC TV interviewed me to hear more about what VMware is doing in the security space and there’s a lot to share about what we're on the desktop, device, virtual and cloud environments!
VMware also had the opportunity to get some perspective from a few of our key technology partners and industry veterans. Thank you to RSA's Bret Hartman for sharing his perspectives with me and our audience on the security space and sharing more details on VMware and RSA's collaborative efforts. In addition Allwyn interviewed Juniper Networks' Chris Hoff, a long-time security influencer to get his take on cloud security, information security and what's happening in the security space.
We're looking forward to RSA 2013, and continuing to work with our customers on their securing their cloud and virtual environments. We hope to see you at next year’s conference!
RSA 2012: Video Interview with RSA's Bret Hartman in Chief Technology Officer
Posted by herrod Mar 1, 2012
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Preserving Multi-Cloud Choice and Flexibility with Cloud Foundry "Open PaaS" in Chief Technology Officer
Posted by herrod Jan 26, 2012It has been nine months since we launched Cloud FoundryTM - the industry's first open platform as a service (aka PaaS). Cloud Foundry debuted with both the CloudFoundry.com service and as an open source project via CloudFoundry.org and we have seen a rich ecosystem of technology providers and service providers emerge around Cloud Foundry. Offering a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services, Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, deploy and scale applications.
We have made great progress on delivering developers a choice of frameworks and application services and now want to highlight the choice of both public and private clouds Cloud Foundry provides today.
Multi-Cloud - "Write Once, Cloud Anywhere"
As PaaS gains momentum, there will be more choices of cloud destinations. Some developers might want to keep the entire development and deployment within their organization's firewall; others may want to build internally and deploy via a hosted service, or vice versa.
As you make choices about cloud technology, one critical factor is whether you have a choice of clouds to which to deploy your applications. Ultimately, what many software developers want is an open PaaS environment with a choice of public, private and hybrid clouds for deployment.
When you build and deploy applications using Cloud Foundry's open architecture and open source availability you don't have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.
Why Multi-Cloud flexibility is so important?
- Managing your growth and changing needs over time - whether you want to run on private clouds or public clouds changes over time. Having the flexibility to add capacity or migrate to another cloud without re-writing your applications it is critical for long term success.
- Protecting against vendor lock-in - you don't want to be locked into a single cloud provider. You need to able to move between providers that suit your pricing needs or can offer better quality of service.
- Meet different compliance and geographical needs - you want to be able to pick and choose where you want to deploy your applications based on compliance requirements, data protection laws, latency constraints and more.
- Accommodate peak loads - being able to leverage a choice of public and private clouds to deal with "cloudbursting" scenarios means you have the ability to optimize your spending.
Cloud Foundry — Making Multi-Cloud a Reality Today
The Cloud Foundry ecosystem is growing quickly with increasing number of technology partners working with us to expand the choice of public cloud providers, private cloud distributions and cloud infrastructures. These partners, combined with simplicity and openness of the Cloud Foundry technology makes the vision of Multi-Cloud a practical reality .
With Cloud Foundry, moving your application to another cloud is very simple. Simply "target" your new cloud and "push" your application. No code or configuration changes required.
Looking at the Cloud Foundry command line tool ("vmc") it looks something like
vmc target api.mynewcloud.com
vmc push myapp
vmc push myapp
The Cloud Foundry team has a blog post that further describes how Cloud Foundry's open architecture and tools enables a quick deployment of complex applications across multiple private and public destinations.
The blog includes a demo showcasing live deployment to five different cloud destinations running Cloud Foundry today without a single code or configuration change to the application.
2012 - The Year of PaaS While Avoiding "Cloud Lock-in"
As many suggest 2012 will be the "year of PaaS", a critical factor for success is the ability to deploy your PaaS-based application across a choice clouds, developer frameworks and application services. With Cloud Foundry, you don't have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.
For more information on Cloud Foundry please visit http://www.CloudFoundry.com
Innovation, entrepreneurship and education ... a Silicon Valley discussion. in Chief Technology Officer
Posted by herrod Aug 2, 2011
It was a very interesting day at VMware today! We hosted an engaging panel discussion on innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation, organized by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
The conversation spanned a variety of topics, from Silicon Valley ‘secret sauce’ for entrepreneurship to the future of education and technology as a transformative force in the global community. It was invigorating to hear from such a variety of accomplished technology leaders ... it’s not often we get to sit down for an hour and discuss the future with these folks.
Participants were Steve Case, founder of AOL, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, John Doerr, icon in venture capital, and Aneesh Chopra, CTO of the United States. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, moderated the discussion in an irreverent and highly informed way.
Some of my favorite comments:
"What is risk, really? Most entrepreneurs don’t know what’s not possible ... what looks like risk to us may not look like risk to them." -John Doerr
"Technology has transformed many fields ... now is the time for the transformation in education. The way that we interact with education will radically change over the next 20 years. We will experience much more personalized, web-based, integrated and self-paced learning ... for schoolchildren as well as adults." -Reed Hastings
"Small and large businesses use web technology to market themselves ... in every sector, every region. These companies grow 2x as fast, hire 2x more people. This is an ecosystem benefitting from innovation around web technology, and we must continue to invest in areas of innovation that will support these job-creating ecosystems." -Sheryl Sandberg
VMware started 13 years ago with an entrepreneurial idea, and our continued success relies on continued invention and innovation. This keeps me and other CTOs awake at night. And as a father of 3 I stay awake thinking about the future that my children will have and the way that our education system needs to evolve to prepare them for the future. I’m glad this council is focused on these and other challenges and am glad VMware can play a part in addressing them.
It was an informative and thought-provoking morning, covering additional topics such as immigration reform and expansion of U.S. nationwide capabilities around innovation.I encourage everyone to check out the full discussion here:
In April I introduced VMware’s acquisition of SlideRocket with a blog entry entitled, "The New Way to Work - End-User Computing in the Post-PC Era". Today I am happy to announce the next step in this journey with our acquisition of Socialcast, a powerful "Enterprise Activity Stream Engine" that unites a company’s people, information, and applications in real-time. In this blog, I discuss this social platform and how it helps evolve the way we work.
First, let’s step back and look at today’s approach to enterprise communication. For the last 30 years, personal computing has primarily focused on automating the metaphors of the pre-digitized workplace including the "inbox" and "outbox" tray, manila folders, and printed documents. We’ve largely replaced printed memos, mail carts, and filing cabinets with documents, email, and file shares. These tools have dramatically improved our productivity, but the increasing volume of information can be overwhelming and requires manual prioritization and organizational work to keep up with this data deluge.
While traditional mail- and document-centric interaction will certainly remain critical, there are new approaches to collaboration taking root that better exploit the paradigms of the web. For example, communication is increasingly iterative, with fine-grained interaction replacing letter-like back-and-forth. Furthermore, these activity streams increasingly take place across dispersed groups of informally linked collaborators rather than following the boundaries of a formal organization hierarchy. And in today’s frantic world, the information in these activity streams should only interrupt the right people at the right time... and of course be safely archived and searchable. In summary, there is an opportunity for improved collaboration across a company that can drive new levels of productivity and employee satisfaction.
VMware is dedicated to the delivery of the technologies and infrastructure needed to enable this new way of working. We see this new approach as an indication that our industry has entered the post-PC era, enabled by advances in mobile devices, SaaS, and cloud computing. This disruption was the rationale behind our acquisition of SlideRocket and Zimbra, and the catalyst for the launch of VMware Horizon App Manager.
Over the last 3 years, Socialcast has been growing rapidly and garnering the reputation as a true visionary in the enterprise collaboration space. By focusing on people and their work habits, they have developed a platform deployed by some of the world’s largest companies to facilitate communication and collaboration across the entire enterprise. The Socialcast team has achieved this success by delivering the key elements of next-generation enterprise collaboration... real-time activity streams, a social graph of the entire enterprise, and the ability to participate in contextual- and purpose-oriented groups. These are fairly standard elements in this space, but there are four traits that make Socialcast particularly special:
- Rich integration capabilities
- Safe Collaboration wherever you work
- On- and Off-premise deployment
- A platform for new collaborative applications
Rich Integration Capabilities
Rather than define enterprise social as yet another tool to use or as a feature rooted in a single application, the Socialcast approach emphasizes the integration of social capabilities across the applications, data, and services that people already use. Socialcast includes an integration capability called Reach to add social elements into existing content sources like SharePoint and wikis. This brings collaboration to the places where people, applications, and data already exist.
Safe Collaboration from Wherever You Work.
It’s obvious that we’re all more mobile these days as well, and the Socialcast platform offers the freedom to participate in collaboration from rich clients, mobile devices, email, and most importantly from within a range of native Windows, on-premise or cloud based business applications. All of this while offering the enterprise the compliance and security features that are required to satisfy end-users, IT and legal groups.
On- and Off-Premise Deployment
We’re clearly in a hybrid-cloud world, with IT offering some services from within their own datacenters and some services from the public cloud. Why force a choice? With Socialcast, you have your choice of on- or off-premise deployment, as it is available either as SaaS or as a VMware virtual appliance that can be deployed behind the firewall. Cool!
A Platform for New Collaborative Applications
And last, but not least is the opportunity to build new enterprise applications upon the core Socialcast platform. It’s still in the early days, but it seems inevitable that enterprises will leverage the employee network and improved collaboration capabilities to change theway they receive feedback, track projects, or do any number of other tasks. For a look at one such application, check out the Socialcast Townhall offering... and stay tuned for other such examples.
Customer Success
Several big customers are enjoying the benefits of Socialcast today. Nokia has deployed Socialcast to alleviate the logjam associated with traditional email communication as well as enable new ways for executive management to communicate and interact with their global workforce. The SAS Institute has deployed Socialcast as the hub through which employees can exchange information as well as using Reach, to add social elements to their SharePoint and wiki installations. Humana has also leveraged the Reach platform to create whole new applications that increase employee engagement by incorporating social gaming elements to reward and recognize employees across their worldwide operations. And we’ve just deployed Socialcast within VMware as well, and are already seeing the signs of a more collaborative, productive, and informed organization.
Examples such as these illustrate the richness of the user experience in the post-PC era. Users can easily tap in to collective knowledge and expertise inside and outside their business, reduce unnecessary meetings and redundant communications, and do all this without being tethered to their desk. VMware is leading the way forward in this era, and the combination of our world class technologies and Socialcast’s focus on social communications and applications will accelerate this transformation of the way people work.
The New Way to Work - End-user computing in the post-PC era in Chief Technology Officer
Posted by herrod Apr 26, 2011Cloud computing is the most impactful advance in information technology in years, and VMware's contributions to this field have been defined by innovations affecting almost every aspect of our technology interactions. From changing the way that IT looks at servers and the datacenter, to delivering the next generation open application platform, to redefining the role of the desktop, VMware innovation has led the charge. But we're just getting started...
The cloud is about much more than just making the IT department's life easier. End-users deserve to reap the benefits of the cloud as well, and "your cloud" is focused on delivering these to both IT and end-users in a very personalized way. Let's make this a bit more concrete...
I don't know about you, but I frequently find myself doing silly things at work. Have you ever found that you
- Email yourself large documents so that you can access them from home or from multiple devices?
- Collaborate on documents by sending around files with names like "vmworld-keynote-v11-PM-SH.ppt"?
- Live with a clogged mailbox where almost all company communication (both relevant and not) occurs?
- Carry two mobile phones so that your personal life can be kept separate from your work life?
- Spelunk for your VPN token just to get access to a single file at work?
- Constantly copy and update "standard" presentations to get the latest templates and data or to customize just one page for a specific audience?
These are the sorts of problems we're attacking in our end-user computing group at VMware. Our mission is to help users get their work done quickly, effectively, safely, and collaboratively. Along the way, they should have their experience at work be as engaging and enjoyable as when working at home with consumer applications.
To date we've attacked these problems through our VMware View, ThinApp, and Zimbra products, and today I'm happy to announce another step forward in offering people a new way to work.
Today, VMware is announcing the acquisition of SlideRocket - the leader in online presentations. SlideRocket's focus on improving the process of building, delivering, and sharing presentations is a testament to the potential of cloud computing to change how business users work, providing them with technology that makes them happier, engaged and more productive.
Presentations are second only to email as the most commonly used business tool. Professionals rely upon presentations for critical business communication such as influencing audiences and closing deals. Yet, despite their critical role, the process of creating, delivering, and sharing presentations is still based on 25-year-old technology, so most presentations remain static, one-way documents that lack impact.
Collaborating with others around presentations often involves sending large file attachments and comments in email, worrying about whether recipients have the appropriate software to review, and wasting time keeping track of who has the latest version. And, once a presentation is shared outside your company, it's impossible to make changes, or even know if someone has viewed it. The process is frustrating and the result is often miscommunication and lost productivity. Perhaps most importantly, this approach to building and sharing presentations is incompatible with our increasingly mobile business lives.
SlideRocket is built for a new, cloud-centric way of working. Its intuitive, web-based interface allows users to easily assemble rich, dynamic presentations that help captivate an audience whether they're in the conference room, on a conference call, or in a coffee shop. Individuals can quickly create slides that flow with dynamic data from sources like Google, Twitter, and Salesforce. Author's charts and graphs are always up-to-date with real-time data from Google spreadsheets, display up to the moment financial information, tap into the instant flow of ideas on twitter, and intelligently assemble sales decks in a single click. People can work as teams to build presentations that take full advantage of the cloud, while analytics provide insight into how presentations are impacting your audience. Most importantly, all SlideRocket presentations are built so audiences can experience them on multiple devices, ranging from desktops to tablets, online or off.
I'm quite enthused about both the product and the great team that is joining VMware. You can read more about this move in SlideRocket CEO Chuck Dietrich's blog here. Better yet, give it a try at http://www.sliderocket.com.
We're doing many exciting things at VMware, but I find our efforts in end-user computing to be among the most personally satisfying. These new products are literally offering me a new way to work, a new way that is more productive, convenient, and fun! Today marks a step forward on this journey, and there are many more exciting steps ahead...