Matt has sketched out a few things already
and we're going to be talking about
taking advantage of VMware on the cloud,
but with a little bit of a focus on lift and shift,
as well as transforming.
So, Matt, real quick, what do we have graphed out over here?
So, right here is - we're kind of picking up from where we left in our last webcast that we did with Jordan
where we talked about more just lifting and shifting the application, re-hosting it if you will.
Where we're more concerned about how do we get the application and the VM,
without changing anything about it, into the cloud as quickly as possible,
and extending that VM
and all the network policy, and everything underneath it,
into the cloud for consistent operations with on-premises and in the cloud.
Right, so last time we saw that, with things like HCX,
it was fairly easy to re-host capabilities
from a VMware running on-premises to something running in the cloud.
Right, exactly.
So, that's what we have here right?
So, right here you have an on-premises, right,
that's what that side is suppose to represent.
And then, after lift and shift, you're in the state called "cloud hosted",
like what we talked about.
Where it's just more moving the application without changing anything about it,
just to get the tactical benefits, and the elasticity of moving to the cloud.
And you know what we were talking about, back at the at the desk, is that
by re-hosting first and in having
your application live in the cloud brings a host of advantages in terms of
the app modernization, because right now we're just focused on getting on the
latest and greatest infrastructure that the cloud has to offer. Right. And then
after that taking advantage of the automation and the and the scalability
and the standardization of the cloud to layer on more services like OpenShift,
and like any other kubernetes services out there. So, that's that's kind of this
you know this time frame that we have laid out here right so every step of the
way you know you're starting on-prem, you're taking that next step to cloud
hosted and now what's that next step? Like from that last
kind of webcast that we did we understood there was a lot of
capabilities helping us here, but you know at the end of the day customers
want to take advantage of higher value services. Right. And capabilities that you
can get in something like IBM Cloud. Exactly, they want of like we're talking
what they want to bring start introducing cloud-native services and
then just as an organization get more adapted to the
the value of being in the cloud, right, and the elasticity of that. So at that stage
we are now at what we call the, I'm going to try making a nice square here, at
cloud-enabled is what we call it. And in this phase we are now taking
advantage of being on the the cloud network right because now you're in the
IBM Cloud, or the cloud in general whatever club that might be, you're in
there private network, you're taking advantage of the services that are on
the the private endpoints and such as you know object storage or analytic
services that might not require changing the application too much, you can still
keep it in a VM. Kind of like plug and play services. Exactly, and you're
not you're not refactoring the application just yet. So, from the
application level you're enriching it as much as you can from the infrastructure
level you're taking advantage of the the consumption models that the cloud has to
offer and using things as needed. So basically your VMs are continuing
to run in a cloud environment but now you're kind of reaching out and taking
advantage of some of these cloud propositions, those cloud services. Exactly, to the extent that it can with the application in it's probably
most likely it's in a three-tier architecture, right. You have your your web tier, your
app tier, and your database tier. Right. And as much as you can integrate
services and that kind of architecture you're taking advantage
of the cloud enabled stage. Right, so now it's less about just lift
and shift and more about transform. Right Maybe you have to get in there sometimes
change some things around, call some third party APIs, you know, yeah that
kind of thing. Exactly, and then after you know from an
operational perspective you're more adapted and ready to take the next
step. This is where we introduce OpenShift and Kubernetes, you know you
have this VMware estate that now lives in the cloud, you have the VMs
there, you have your legacy applications living on top of them. Now you can start
to think about re-platforming, or even re-hosting, or not re-hosting, you can
start rearchitecting or refactoring the application. So, here you'll see that
we'll have the VM here, and then you'll see that we have we're gonna use
a container right here. So this is what we're going to use to to label a
container. And this is still kind of you know, you're not fully cloud-native
yet, so we're gonna call this cloud labeled as well. And at this stage you
know...You've got them side by side like VM's working alongside containers in the
environment. Assuming all the networking pieces are in place below and you have
this common network fabric you know and that's the value that NSX from
VMware brings is that you can have this common network fabric across containers
and VM's. Now you're able to start to thinking about, all right I want
to keep my databases of VM because that's stateful, right. Right. And I
have these stateless components of my application that don't really
rely on storage as much and can be containerized and re-platformed and
that's what we're doing here and it's kind of like this hybrid world where the
application is living as containers and also as a VM too. Right. And so, this you
know assuming this an old monolithic, heritage application that
there are some some benefits that the app tier and the web tier can
get out of being a container. Exactly, so let's say in that VM like you mentioned
we had all three tiers, what if we break apart a front-end that can really
take advantage of things like cloud auto scaling capabilities and the fact that
you can distribute that cloud application across data centers, you know
all over the world where IBM Cloud has data centers. Basically allowing that
front-end that's not you know stateful, it's a stateless application to take
better advantage of cloud-native concepts right away. Right.
Whereas kind of those legacy apps as VMS where you have to start thinking about
refactoring if you wanted to make them cloud-native, kind of changing that
that's stateful layer. Those might take some more time. Right. So, that's that
halfway step, that modernization step. Exactly, this is the in-between phase and
really this is this this part of the story here is really what the value of
lift, shift, and transform is that customers are doing this at their own
pace, it's not a sushi roll of a solution that they need to take a bite of the
whole thing altogether. Whether there's pieces of that sushi they don't like,
right. So, they're able to take it step-by-step here and in a way that
makes sense to them that fits their strategic goals, right. And you know
there's some other numbers out there, there's 50 million VMs that are
still out there in the world today, right. And a lot of most business
applications still run on VM. So, I think it's it's wise to realize that the
future will still have VMs in it and we'll probably see scenarios like this
where we have databases living in VM still, but you
have all the that client interfacing parts of the application, all
containerized and able to introduce new functionality to it. Right. I mean
there's still some capabilities out there that were written you know in like
the 70s and 80s that are still chugging along that no one wants to go in there
and change those out. Exactly, and like we talked about back there that you know
they're the people that actually wrote the teams that wrote those applications
they're long gone and it's it's lost in translation. So, I'm
guessing, you know you hinted at where you're going with this last phase here,
the end of all of this modernization phase we're gonna have..? Cloud-native, heeyyy. (laughter)
So, by this point, you know we've kind of decoupled the application from
virtual machines all together, at least the parts that that were that are you
know in in containers now. So, we don't really need to rely on hypervisors as
much anymore. Now that the application is abstracted enough that we
can start taking advantage of higher value services like OpenShift as a
Service. So, you don't really have to rely on the the actual hardware anymore, you
can take advantage of services like the IBM Cloud provides that make OpenShift
more of like an endpoint where you're only bursting as much
OpenShift capacity that you need for your application to run and to
develop with it. So, let me draw this out here. So, you have your application here
and it's running now and let me label it cloud-native. Cloud-native, that's right. So, this
is kind of when, you know you've phased out some of those legacy
applications. Right. Many of your assets aren't required to run as a VM anymore.
Right, so and then you're taking advantage of, let me get my green marker
here, of services like our managed Kubernetes service here, and also now
that you're at this cloud-native development stage you can start taking
advantage of other microservices and you yourself have turned your
application into microservices too. Right. So that it's just working, you
know, where you've achieved this cloud-native development state. Right. So, there
we're taking advantage of you know, we have machine learning capabilities, higher
value AI, those capabilities that really enable you, like kind of like we
mentioned to create more engaging applications, applications that are
connecting to your end users just a little bit better. Right. So Matt this was
really helpful to be able to actually sketch this out and show how, you know,
how every step of the way with VMware solution,s with
VMware solutions on IBM Cloud, you're supported kind of every phase of that
modernization path. Right. If you have any questions please drop us a line below. If
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